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