A Purpose in Life

An AQC

A Note on John Tanner
Indian Captive from Boone County, Kentucky

Pioneers were reputed to have hard lives. Much has been made of this, and it is mostly true, but there were people who lived even harder lives. The so-called red-men, or Indians, are sometimes thought to live free and easy lives out in the woods, but there are enough people with a sense of reality that this idea has not been totally accepted.

When a book like John Tanner's Narrative (recently reprinted as The Falcon) comes along the realistic aspect of Indian life comes to the fore. Almost every review of the book concentrates on how hard the life was, and how much he endured. This is all true, but is not the whole story.

When he was first adopted John was treated most cruelly. This cannot be denied. His adoptive father tomahawked him and left him for dead for falling asleep when he was supposed to be working. He was almost constantly hungry. He says he slept near the door of the lodge and everyone who went by at night either kicked him or poured cold water on him. He also endured other kinds of highly disgusting treatment. No one should be treated this way, of course, but it may have made his later survival possible.

He mentions being stranded in snowstorms several times. He knew if he stopped or rested he would not be able to continue. Once his mother, Netnokwa, had moved the camp several miles away, not expecting him back. He was so frostbitten he could not leave home to hunt for a month afterwards. Anyone accustomed to soft surroundings and good treatment would probably have sat down and given up in such adverse circumstances. We have a number of examples of John's extreme stubbornness.

Was his life sad? Yes, in certain ways; but everyone has a sad life to some extent. No one gets out alive. We all experience sickness, death, horror of various kinds, some more than others. Life is not fair, but even hardship gives a sense of purpose that most lives would not have any other way. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman, wrote of this with great insight in his book The True Believer (1951):

The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility. The goals are concrete and immediate. Every meal is a fulfillment; to go to sleep on a full stomach is a triumph; and every windfall a miracle.

At one point John Tanner went to work for a white trader. The life promised to be much more easy than that to which he was accustomed, and also to lead to greater prosperity. Nevertheless, after a short time John became dissatisfied and went back to his hunting life. He knew that hunger would continue to be a significant aspect of his life; so be it: hunger has played a significant role in the history of civilization. An eminent philosopher once wrote: "Hunger made the gods."

Though John Tanner's life was hard, it was full of adventure, there was little time to be dissatisfied, except failure to excel in the hunt. This life gave him an immediate sense of purpose that was lacking from a more sedentary life.

This is an Archival Quality Communication

Download John Tanner's book, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (1830).

James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone, Kentucky

On Generating Evidence

An AQC from James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone, Kentucky

Philip Alexander Bruce, perhaps the greatest of the historians of Old Virginia, wrote a huge volume of important work on the subject. In the Preface to his Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (1907) he make a statement concerning the difficulty of finding material that directly concerns social life. It must all be inferred from other types of documents:

To acquire an accurate conception of the Virginian social life from 1607 to 1700, the student must examine a very large mass of miscellaneous printed and manuscript materials which are primarily concerned with other subjects . . .

Almost anyone can write something, and call it "history", when there are plenty of documents that deal with the subject. We often find books that are little more than a patchwork quilt of quotations from so-called sources. These can be valuable as a kind of running index to published and MS. work, but they are usually not original in any significant way.
The best historians can write authoritatively when nothing seems to bear on the subject. That is the aim, at any rate, and that is the real challenge of the historian.

This is an Archival Quality Communication

Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.

History in a List

An Inventory of the Estate of Clary Eve Deceased

1805

Boone County Will Book A

One mulatto boy named Reuben $300.00
Eight volumes of the History of Clarissa Harlowe $ 6.00
Three ditto of Domestic Encyclopedia $ 6.00
Two ditto of Sheridan's Dictionary $ 5.00
One Book, to wit, Quincy's Lexicon improved $ 2.50
One Ditto Phytologia $ 2.00
One Ditto Philosophy $ 1.50
One Ditto Simpson's Euclid $ 1.50
One Ditto Botanic Garden $ 1.50
One Ditto Darwin's Temple of Nature $ 1.50
One Ditto Brigg's Cookery $ 1.25
One Ditto Polite Education $ 1.25
One Ditto Paine's writings $ 1.00
One Ditto Goldsmith's Greece $ 1.00
One Ditto Illiad of Homer $ 0.75
One Ditto Seneca's Morals $ 0.75
One Ditto Entick's Dictionary $ 0.75
Four Ditto $ 1.75
Four Ditto $2; Six Ditto $2.50 $ 4.50
Six Ditto $2; Ten Ditto $1.25 $ 3.25
One Musick Ditto $ .50
Six Quire lettering paper $ 1.50
Seventeen Ditto Letter Ditto $ 3.00
One pair Candlesticks $ 2.50
Five drinking glasses $ 1.25

History is where you find it. Anything that exists in the present may be the occasion of an historical research. I have posted a copy of this list on the Annals of Boone County (KY), and you can find it here: Estate Inventory of Clarissa Kirtley Eve. As a writer and researcher my challenge is to make this list come alive in a way that the reader can feel its significance. This can be done by finding out as much as possible about each item on the list, and thinking about how the owner of the items felt about them.

To get an idea of how this can be done examine an online edition of her Cook Book. (This is the 1788 edition, and hers was printed in 1792; but the two volumes are probably very similar. You may download and save this book if you are interested.)

Now you are in a position to see if what I wrote brings the list to life or not. My essay is entitled: Notes on an Inventory of the Books of Clarissa Kirtley Eve, 1805. This seems to be the largest library in early Boone County.

I would be glad to hear the remarks of any reader who will reply to this

Archival Quality Communication

James Duvall, M. A.
Boone County Public Library
Boone County, Kentucky

Why Kentucky Land Titles are a Problem

Remarks on the Settlement of Kentucky by Benjamin F. Stevenson, Burlington, Kentucky, 1886:

What is now known on the map as the State of Kentucky was, during our Revolutionary struggle, an appanage of the then colony of Virginia; and in the year 1777 it was organized by the House of Burgess as a county under the name of Kentucky, and it was allowed two representatives in the House of Burgess. In 1781 three counties were organized out of the one—Fayette, Jefferson, and Lincoln — with two representatives assigned to each county, the territory still retaining its designation as Kentucky, but losing its organization as a county. At the close of the Revolutionary War, Virginia was encumbered with a heavy debt, contracted mainly in the common defense of the Nation.

The vast body of land north of the Ohio River — an empire in extent—claimed by Virginia to be within her chartered limits, she with singular magnanimity surrendered to the National Government — in trust — as a fund out of which the general indebtedness, contracted during the war, should be paid. Out of this grant five States have grown up, viz.: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The lands of Kentucky were reserved by Virginia to aid in the liquidation of the debt to her own citizens.

In pursuance of this policy the Land Office of the State was opened at Richmond, where patents were granted to all who were able and willing to pay a nominal price per acre, and then undergo the fatigue and additional expense of a survey of the tract. A certificate of survey was required at the land office at Richmond to perfect the title. The State made no surveys, nor was it responsible for the accuracy of any made. It established no meridian line and no point of departure for surveys. If the wit of man had been taxed to devise a scheme to delude and defraud the unwary, none more fertile could have been adopted.

Fabulous stories of the fertility and beauty of the new territory open for settlement spread over all the land, and a steady stream of emigrants poured in, much the larger portion of it from Virginia, each head of a family carrying with him a land patent, with authority to locate and survey any vacant or unoccupied land he might fancy.

The inevitable result of this loose method of business was reaped in after years in numerous land suits, when it was found that all the more valuable portions of the State was shingled with conflicting patents and interlapping lines of survey three or four times over.

The courts first held that the oldest patent carried the land, but afterward, under the Occupying Claimant Laws of the State, the same courts decided that a junior patent with twenty years of occupancy held to the extent of its survey and claim.

Benjamin F. Stevenson, “Kentucky Neutrality in 1861” (Paper read 2 June 1886) Cincinnati: H. C. Sherick & Co., 1886, p. 3-4.

A System of Relations

Karl Polanyi, one of the greatest of economic historians, wrote in 1944 that economics describes a system of relations between people:

The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only insofar as they serve this end.
(Primative, Archaic and Modern Economies, Anchor ed., 1968, p. 7)

Economics as a science describes an abstract situation. People do not exchange goods merely for profit, but for a host of reasons, and only some of them are strictly "economic". What we call economics is embedded in the social functions of society, and when we extract these activities from their context—as we must do to think about them in certain ways, say mathematically—we inevitably falsify the data to some extent. What is the solution? To recognize that what we call "facts" (Latin factum = "something made") are created for a certain purpose, and that they do not explain the whole situation. It is easy to lie with statistics, and if we are not careful this is exactly what we will do with economic data.

This is an Archival Quality Communication.

James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone, Kentucky

History, Narrative, and Time

Prof. Nisbet, a sociologist, used to hanging around the slum districts of history, makes the following observation:

On the whole, historiography has been built around this conception of time as unilinear flow, and narrative has been the means by which all the past’s multiplicities of circumstances and pluralities of sequence have been compressed into an apparently unitary perspective. But problems of selection and arrangement have been formidable. How are we to deal, for example, with the history of Europe as a unity when what we are actually given is not one but a whole congeries of local, institutional, and national histories, each with its own identity, each coming in uninterrupted fashion right down to the present day? The result has been to reify the concept of Europe, to give it an identity greater than the sum of its parts, and to convert some of the actual histories into mere life-phases of the conceptualized whole; hence, the familiar practice of treating Greece only in the early chapters of a book on Europe, chopping off its history arbitrarily when Rome forges into prominence, and doing the same with Rome when feudalism begins to appear in France.

All this is difficult enough on the scale of European civilization; it becomes absurdly impossible on the world scale unless one follows the Hegelian procedure of tracking a Zeitgeist through its different resting places on earth. But the difficulties of operating with narrative in a single time perspective are not really obviated by reducing the scope of the subject to the nation or even the local community. Always we are dealing with plurality that unilinear narrative cannot easily absorb.

Robert A Nisbet, “History and Sociology”, Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Sociological Essays (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 100.

Now this is all perfectly true. I think the solution is to deal with as many aspects of the various strands of history as anyone is interested in; but do not think you will pull every strand. Each strand of history, like bandwidth, is infinitely divisible. The matter becomes different when history becomes "my history". Then one can take as much of Greece, Rome, China, or Tibet, as serves his purposes. A Muslim or Buddhist living in America today will have a very different view of his roots and the origins of his traditions. If I find my interest in Palestine, or Troy, he may find his on the Ganges, or on the cobblestones of Mecca. Our narratives will be very different, but some of the narratives may be of more interest to potential readers than others, depending on their own traditions and worldviews. Each of us writes history for himself (unless he is that despicable thing: a hackwriter who produces history for pay): It is the reader who looks over my shoulder who decides whether or not it is for him.

On the local level, as Nisbet says, this is also true. No one can write the entire history of a community (assuming we can even decide exactly what a community is). It is impossible to exhaust the content of meaning from a single locality or group. It is always a work in progress. As the historian begins to examine his world he will find some strands that interest him more than others. To examine a part in abstraction falsifies the whole; but then to recognize that our conclusions are not absolutely true means that we can work to reintegrate this new understanding into the rest of the story. This is in fact the problem of all knowledge: everything we know is to a great extent unverifiable. We continue working until we become satisfied that the web we weave is true. Individual items are subject to correction, but the thing itself is a durable representation of reality — as we see it. A greater historian, one who has greater experience with that community, or greater access to its records, may be able to weave a truer and better tapestry. Every local knows enough about his community, whether truth or legend, to decide whether he agrees with the historian's view. He can always tell the stories his way, and that too is publication of history.

This is a thought in progress . . . but it is an

Archival Quality Communication

James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone, Kentucky

Note on Equalization of Taxes in Early Kentucky

In answer to the question: What does the column in the Boone County Tax Books that says "Value under the Equalization Law" mean?

Dear Sir,

It was nice to talk to you today about Boone County History. I think there is quite a lot, especially about the northern part of Boone County, that I could learn from you. I look forward to seeing your completed book, or books. Do you have any papers or other material you have compiled that might be instructive for someone such as myself to review? If so I would look them over right away and return the material to you as soon as possible.

In regard to your question about tax equalization, I will be as informative as possible, but I do not (yet) know how the equalization functions, or why it seems to fall on some taxpayers, and not others. There must be some formula as to how this is done, or a policy as to whom it applies, and when. That will have to wait for an answer.

Equalization refers to the process of achieving a uniform rate of valuation, and hence an equitable burden of taxes. This may be between individual taxpayers within a district; or it may refer to a means of equalizing them between districts, which would be counties in Kentucky. The aim is that similar property would be taxed at like values uniformly across the state, not according to local considerations. (Black’s Law Dictionary, s.v. "Equalization") This, of course, cannot ever be achieved in practice, but the attempt is admirable.

In Kentucky equalization applies to counties rather than to individual taxpayers within the county. The Commonwealth in early days received property taxes; the county laid a levy on individuals, never property. The counties today receive part of the property taxes, but even today equalization is between counties. The current statutes state: "The Department of Revenue shall equalize each year the Assessments of the property among the counties. . . . When the property of any county, or any class of property in any county, is not assessed at its fair cash value, such assessment shall be increased or decreased to its fair cash value by fixing the percentage of increase or decrease necessary to effect the equalization." (K.R.S. 133.150)

In the early days the land was divided into first, second, and third rate lands. This seems to have been changed by the equalization law. At least in the 1840 tax book, at which I am looking right now, the lands are not so rated, nor in any later book which I have examined. This is probably because the classification of the various rates was so subjective that many first and second class lands hid under the third class rate. The equalization was to establish the true value of the land instead of classifying all the classes at the same rate.

There are some interesting remarks made on this taxation in the American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1842.

Kentucky. — This State had a revenue from taxation, in 1839, of $250,000 on an assessment of ten cents on $100; by a law of the last session this tax has been increased five cents on the $100. The State has also a revenue of over $40,000 derived from taxes on law process, deeds, seals, &c. (p. 105)

The Commercial Review of the South and West, for 1850, edited by J. D. B. de Bow in New Orleans, lists all the revenue in the state for 1845 and 1846. He summarizes this by saying:

The whole value of the above articles, including the effects of the equalization, about 27 millions, was, in 1846, estimated in taxation at $242,388,967. The whole revenue from taxes, $1383,283. The average value of land in the State was estimated at $6.31 per acre. (p. 198)

Prof. Arthur Yager in a paper entitled "State and Local Taxation in Kentucky", (1884) writes:

In Kentucky about one-third of all the taxes in the state are levied and collected by the state government. In many rural districts the only kinds of property taxation known are those imposed by the state authorities. The unit of administration for financial, as well as other purposes, is the county. (The Johns Hopkins University Circulars. Baltimore, 1884, p. 130)

He goes on to say (in 1884): "There is no state board of equalization, and the most glaring inequalities between different counties and classes of property naturally result." (ibid.) And he adds that the same difficulty is found all over the South.

There was later instituted a Board of Equalization for the state, but it was not very efficient. In the Report of the Special Tax Commission of the State of Kentucky, 1912-14 (Frankfort, 1914) it is stated in regard to the functioning of this body under the heading "Equalization between counties":

The State Board of Equalization then proceeds to "equalize" between counties by adding to or deducting from the value of the property as accessed such percentages as will make the value conform to the true value in money. Whenever they intend to raise a county, they send notice of that intention to the county, and the County Court may send representatives to object. The same procedure is followed in case of a proposed reduction. But this is obviously unimportant. (p. 18)

This is all very interesting, and may serve to show what equalization is, but it does not show how it works. We may imagine just what political machinations come into play when a County Court is notified that its valuation is being raised. We can also consider that valuations may be raised for political motives, or to put pressure on certain politicians. In short, we can imagine that the process of equalization may have been worse than the original evil of inequalities between the counties. Kentucky, and most of the rest of the South, with a long tradition of "pauper counties" (the term is actually very old), have never had a very fair system, if that means everyone paying the same rates on the same types of property.

There is a good deal more that can be said on this subject, and I would be interested in any comments you have about the matter. I would be particularly interested in any observations that would serve as evidence for how the equalizations work in practice. I am hoping to find a good description of this somewhere, but actual instances from the tax records are the best way of telling how it worked in practice.

All the best,

James Duvall, M. A.
Annals of Boone County
Boone County, Kentucky

AQC

This is Archival Quality Communication at its best.