Kentucke's Frontiers

Preface

Preface “There are two ways of being Ameri­ can,” expounded English writer D. H. Lawrence in 1926: “by recoiling into individual smallness and insentience, and gutting the great continent in frenzies of mean fear. It is the ‘Puritan way.’ The other is by touch; touch America as she is; dare to touch her! And this is the heroic way.” Since 1784, when John Filson published The Discovery, Settlement , and Present State of Kentucke, trans-­ Appalachian promoters and historians alike have celebrated the heroic way of being Ameri­ can. White men who encroached upon and settled Kentucke became (and have remained) cultural heroes imbued with greater character than many actually enjoyed. Consider esteemed historian Robert V. Remini’s thoughts of 1992: “Because of my research into early Kentucky history, I came to recognize the extraordinary number of genuine heroes who decorate its history. Probably, this is true of many other states as well. I just don’t know. But I do know it is true of Kentucky.” Well, of course it is just as true of other states, but the pioneer hero—as embodied in Filson’s story of Daniel Boone, in the ideal of the “Hunters from Kentucky” memorialized in song following the War of 1812, in Lord Byron’s celebration of the “back-­ woodsman of Kentucky ,” in the character of Natty Bumppo who hunted and fought his way through James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales of the 1830s, in George Caleb Bingham’s 1852 painting of Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, in the pioneer farmers celebrated by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 for overcoming the stubborn Ameri­ can environment, in the 1939 movie Drums along the Mohawk, and in coonskin caps of the 1950s and 1960s that identified viewers of Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone TV series—was and remains a prototype of the Preface xviii • Kentucke frontiersman, of the “genuine hero” who, as Remini put it, “took fantastic personal risks to realize a dream, a dream that ultimately benefited millions of others.” Celebration of the heroic way has led to a misperception that Kentucke embodied the Ameri­ can frontier experience, one that was uniformly and primarily a progression of (white Ameri­ can) civilization that repeated itself on each successive frontier as Ameri­ cans continued westward. It is an ideal that was created by nineteenth-­ century historians determined to establish Kentucky ’s colonial lineage, that was made sacrosanct by Turner’s “frontier thesis,” and that continues to permeate national history and popular memory. Frontier heroism provides a cultural marker against which we measure our own national character. “We think back to the pioneers of an earlier century,” Ronald Reagan remarked on the occasion of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, “and the sturdy souls who took their families and their belongings and set out into the frontier of the Ameri­ can West. Often, they met with terrible hardship. . . . But grief only steeled them to the journey ahead.” A quarter-­ century earlier , John F. Kennedy prefaced the “New Frontier” by appealing to the heroism of an older one: “From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind us, the pioneers gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build our new West. They were not the captives of their own doubts, nor the prisoners of their own price tags. They were determined to make the new world strong and free—an example to the world, to overcome its hazards and its hardships, to conquer the enemies that threatened from within and without.” Boone and his peers have long represented the sturdy, determined, heroic qualities of the Ameri­ can frontiersman, and Ameri­ cans have long celebrated the ways in which their forebears connected with the grandeur of the North Ameri­ can continent and physically mastered it and its indigenous inhabitants. This was, and remains, the inspirational vision of our frontier past. Yet, heroism did not manifest in a vacuum. The heroic way required the other way of being Ameri­ can—the frenzies of mean fear shaped in an atmosphere of random violence, large-­ scale war, and both real and imagined terror that inspired violent re- Preface • xix action and imbued martial manliness. This “Puritan way” was far more pervasive and insidious than we have allowed in our retelling of the past. As on contemporary frontiers such as those in Pennsylvania where, according to historian Peter Silver, “horror and fear flowed from the...