The Land We Dreamed: Poems

Preface

Preface The Land We Dreamed is the last book of my trilogy about rural Kentucky. It attempts to satisfy a long and deeply held curiosity about the early experiences of people in Kentucky, beginning with the first Ice Age hunters who wandered south of the glaciers into what must have seemed a paradise and stretching to the pioneers at the edge of civilization in the late eighteenth century. As a boy hunting squirrels in the extensive woods of Panther Creek Bottoms near Owensboro, Kentucky, I wondered what it was like there two hundred years ago, when there were panthers among giant, untimbered trees. Older, sitting around campfires in bigger woods, my curiosity reached back, past the record of the first colonial hunters wandering in from east of the mountains, to the very first people to enter Kentucky. Who were they? What did they see? What was it “like”? This book is an attempt to scratch the itch of that curiosity, to say what it was like, but it is not a history. It is a small net of imagination cast into history, both the known and the unknown, seeking to catch the little fish of experience that dart through history’s larger one. In order to do this, I have tried to create as realistic a context as possible. There are a few well-known historical figures here: Dr. Thomas Walker, Mary Draper Ingles, and the hunters and trappers Daniel Boone, James Drake and Casper Mansker. Lesserknown are the Shawnee chiefs, Nimwha and Lawaughqua, the Seneca, Kyashuta, and James and Jane Trimble. I throw in my own xii Preface obscure pioneer ancestors for good measure. The other characters are fictional, a product of reading and the imagination. The two French Jesuits, for whom I appropriated the label “coureurs des bois” from its more historical use to describe French hunters and trappers, owe their existence to the late historian Lowell Harrison who, one morning over a cup of coffee at Western Kentucky University, fired my imagination by suggesting that the first Europeans in Kentucky might have been Jesuits wandering down from French territory around the Great Lakes. ...