[PREFACE]
I
What is a Kentucky book, is the one great question this work has elicited. Surely a Kentucky book is one written by a Kentuckian about Kentucky or Kentuckians and printed in Kentucky; surely it is a book written by a Kentuckian upon any subject under the sun, and published in any clime; surely it is one written in Kentucky by a citizen of any other state or country, regardless of the subject or place of publication, for, "in general, I have regarded the birthplace of a piece of literature more important than that of the author." But is a book, though treating of Kentucky or Kentuckians, regardless of its place of publication, whose author was not born in, nor for any appreciable period resided in, this state, entitled to be properly classified as a Kentucky work? The writer has responded in the negative to this question in the present work.
There have been several noted American authors who have written volumes about Kentucky or Kentuckians, and they themselves were not natives of this state, nor resided within its confines. Those early Western travelers rarely omitted Kentucky from their journeys. The first of them, F. A. Michaux, published his famous Travels to the West of the Alleghany Mountains, in the States of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, at London, in 1805; two years later F. Cuming's Tour to the Western Country, through Ohio and Kentucky, was printed at Pittsburg; and in 1817 John Bradbury got out the first edition of his now noted Travels in the Interior of America, at London. Bradbury died in 1823 and to-day lies buried in the cemetery at Middletown, Kentucky, near Louisville. George W. Ogden's Letters from the West (New Bedford, 1823); W. Bullock's Sketch of a Journey through the Western States (London, 1827); and Tilly Buttrick's Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries (Boston, 1831), round out fairly well that group of Scotchmen, Englishmen, New Englanders, and what not, who found many interesting things in Kentucky a hundred years and more ago. Ogden spent two summers in Kentucky; Bullock owned a river-side tract near Ludlow, Kentucky, and old Bradbury sleeps in a quiet Kentucky hamlet, but neither of them may be properly classified as a real Kentuckian.
The Beauchamp-Sharp tragedy of 1825 was the one Kentucky event that kindled the imaginations of more alien writers than any other happening in our history. Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, Charles Fenno Hoffman, G. P. R. James, James Hall, and several others, wrote plays, novels, and poems based upon this tragedy. In 1832 James Kirke Paulding, the friend of Washington Irving, published one of the earliest Kentucky romances, entitled Westward Ho! which name he got from the old Elizabethan drama of John Webster and Thomas Dekker. Two years after the appearance of Paulding's tale, William A. Caruthers, the Virginia novelist, printed The Kentuckian in New York; and in the same year Thomas Chandler Haliburton ("Sam Slick"), put forth one of his earliest works, Kentucky, a Tale (London, 1834). In 1845 Charles Winterfield's My First Days With the Rangers, appeared, to be followed the next year by William T. Porter's A Quarter Race in Kentucky.
These writers hardly did more than point the way to Kentucky for Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose world-famous novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (Boston, 1852), was set against a background of slave-holding Kentucky. This is the most famous example our literature affords of a writer of another state or country coming to Kentucky for the materials out of which to build a book.
In 1860 David Ross Locke, the Ohio journalist and satirist, discovered the Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby, postmaster at "Confedrit X Roads, Kentucky," and his political satires on Kentucky, the Nasby Letters, tickled the readers of his paper, The Toledo Blade, through many years. These alleged communications from poor Petroleum may be read to-day in Locke's Swingin' Round the Cirkel, and Ekkoes from Kentucky. J. G. Marshall's The Outlaw Brothers (New York, 1864); Miss Martha Remick's Millicent Halford: a Tale of the Dark Days of Kentucky in the year 1861 (Boston, 1865); two novels by Edward Willett, entitled Kentucky Border Foes, and Old Honesty: a Tale of the Early Days of Kentucky, both of which were issued in the late sixties; Constance F. Woolson's Two Women (New York, 1877), and Mrs. Anna Bowman Dodd's story, Glorinda (Boston, 1888), concludes the group of writers of the comparatively modern school who did not linger long in the "meadowland," but who found it good literary soil, and helped themselves accordingly.
In recent years Mr. Winston Churchill's The Crossing, Dr. James Ball Naylor's The Kentuckian, Mr. Augustus Thomas's The Witching Hour, and the Kentucky lyrics of Mrs. Alice Williams Brotherton, the Ohio poet, have drawn fresh attention to Kentucky as a background for literary productions, although they are written by those who cannot qualify as Kentuckians. But to claim any of these writers for the Commonwealth, would be to make one's self absurd. Dr. Naylor's lines upon this point are apropos:
I must admit—although it hurts!—
That I was born unlucky;
I've never, literally, had
A home in Old Kentucky.
And yet I feel should wayward Chance
Direct my steps to roam there,
I'd meet you all and greet you all—
And find myself at home there!