Kentucke’s Frontiers by Craig Thompson Friend (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 82 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Kentucke’s Frontiers Craig Thompson Friend S ettling Kentucky began as a “contest for land and hunting rights” and for both Indian and white residents it became a “fight for survival” (91). So much seems obvious, but right from the start, Craig Thompson Friend’s Kentucke’s Frontiers presses the reader to look more deeply, tracing how this contest had by the 1780s begun “to assume the characteristics of a racial war” (91). Color—yellow, copper, red—became identified with savages, and black with “reliable and safe companions in the face of terror ” (97). With this racialization, the sheer terror of intentional violence increased. Here, Friend introduces violence as a central aspect of his narrative. Meanwhile, by the 1780s, more and more families arrived, often preferring to move directly on to their own farms rather than staying in defensive forts and stations . White male Kentuckians, then, just as they began to come into their own Kentucky households, were unable to protect their families . “With each attack,” Friend writes, “the Indians chipped away at white manhood and patriarchy” (109). Friend provides masterful accounts of life in the forts and on the scattered frontier farms. Throughout the book, the author’s foregrounding of interrelated questions of gender (most prominently matters of manhood) and violence somehow renders each example more graphic and gripping than many traditional frontier narratives. By the 1790s, Kentucky’s political leaders envisioned a less fluid and more stable society—a “republican” society based on a perhaps mythical Virginia elite model. The term “republican” or “classical republican” has accumulated so much scholarly baggage that the whole discussion has perhaps gone a bit stale, but Friend has put the concept to fresh use here to describe an elitist rather than inclusive worldview centered above all on “white male citizenship as the foundation of society” (177). More stable in many ways and growing by leaps and bounds, the Kentucky of the early 1790s remained vulnerable to Indian attack. When this situation changed after 1794, Kentuckians transferred—and completely racialized—the frontier’s violent fear of the “Other” from the Indian to the enslaved. This deeply felt urge transformed the social order itself. The ideal of male citizenship became southern patriarchy, with its own intrinsically and sometimes horrifically violent fear and abhorrence of “Others.” With statehood in 1792 (when Kentucke officially became Kentucky), the frontier’s fluidity and potential for democracy turned southern. At this point, the central narrative of this book is complete, except for a return to the old Indian-fighting Kentucky during the War of 1812 and, through memory, into the 1820s, where the book ends. Friend’s narrative of frontier -to-South through transformations of manhood and racial power best fits certain well-worn aspects of early Kentucky history. The book, however, is much more inclusive and comprehensive . Readers will find accounts of the Green River Country and Appalachia as well as the Bluegrass; Choctaws dining in Maysville in 1823 on their way to Washington; Lafayette’s famous 1824 visit; the horrible Harpe brothers BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2011 83 running amok in the Kentucky-Tennessee borderlands ; and of course Daniel Boone. Friend writes in five- to ten-page segments, a great many of which are vivid and thought-provoking short essays in themselves. Kentucke’s Frontiers is the seventh volume in the admirable series, “A History of the Trans-Appalachian West,” edited by Malcolm J. Rohrbough and Walter Nugent, which is devoted to the “opening and closing of the settlement frontier” (xiii). Previous volumes include James E. Davis’s Frontier Illinois (1998) and Stephen Aron’s American Confluence (2006), each of which has in its own way situated an evolving regional history within the boundaries of a single present -day state. Most, like Friend, have found ways to embrace the constraint, though inevitably at some interpretive cost. The general editors have allowed and even encouraged each author to develop his own slant and follow his own passion. The result, in Kentucke’s Frontiers, is a vigorous and original new synthesis of Kentucky’s early history. Marion C. Nelson Richmond, Virginia Craig Thompson Friend. Kentucke’s Frontiers . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 400 pp...