Customer Reviews

Daniel Boone and Others on the Kentucky Frontier: Autobiographies and Narratives, 1769-1795

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This is a book of collected primary sources about frontier Kentucky edited by Reid. These sources are materials written or dicated to a writer that are first hand accounts of life in Kentucky. Reid does an excellent job in describing the prejudices and circumstances involved in these sources. Kentucky was a war zone. The native Americans were resisting the expansion of European settlers into their traditional territories such as Kentucky. This was not a unified resistance with several tribes north of the Ohio River including the Shawnee, Wyandot and Deleware tribes and the Cherokee and others to the south in the Appalachian mountains. Even so there were no "civilians" to be found on either side as the war involved all men, women and children on both sides, with both sides committing attrocities to the traditional non-combatants. These stories paint a grime picture of life in Kentucky that encompassed a whole generation of people.

These are stories from the setlers themselves. They describe life on a warring frontier where everybody carried a weapon even when going to plant a field. Native Americans used whatb would be called "terror tatics" in the modern world. Ambush, cattle and horse theft and kidnapping all being common in thie 22 year span covered by this book. One particular story of a family that moved into a new area and were discovered by Native Americans. The warriors simply stole the cow bells from their live stock to impress upon the family what would happen if they staid where they were, isolated from other European families. The accounts of the burning at the stake of Col. Crawford is told in horrid detail. The book leaves the reader with no doubts that frontier Kentucky was not for the pacificist.

The accounts used include Filson's biography of Daniel Boone, John D. Shane's interviews with Josiah Collins and William Sudduth, Dr. John Knight' story of his capture and witness of Col. Crawford's execution, John Slover's story of his capture from the same expedition and finally John Tanner's story of capture as a child in Kentucky and 30 years amongst the Native Americans in the north west territories. There are some illustrations by the author of forts or stations and some maps.

This is also a good source for distilling history for a couple of reasons. First of all it shows the difficulty the settlers faced in this period and just how hard it was to raise a crop and make whiskey. Most of this whiskey was probably made for consumption, not trade. It is also interesting in that the earliest documents do not refer to spirits as "whiskey" but as "rum". At one point a Native American asks a settler to teach him to "make rum from corn". The only document that does refer to spirits as whiskey is the Tanner narrative that was written in the 1820s. It was probably the "whiskey rebellion" that caused the change in nomenclature.

This is a good book to have in your distilling library because it does a very good job in setting the stage for early Kentucky disilling. The region was a war zone until the battle of Falling Timbers finally drove the Native Americans to a treaty that virtually drove them from the area.

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