Posted 14 December 2004

            We are a hardy freeborn race,
            Each man to fear a stranger,
            Whate’er the game, we join in chase
            Despising toil and danger…
            O Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky;
            O Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky!

The song that gives Ted Franklin Belue’s book its name was first performed in New Orleans in 1822 to an appreciative audience of Mississippi boatmen, and its instant success helped to ensure that the Kentucky Hunter – the long-knife, the leather stocking, the deerslayer of yore – would remain an iconic figure in the American pantheon. Daniel Boone, that most famous of Kentuckians, had only died two years previously, at the astonishingly ripe age of 85, the wilderness of his youth transformed almost beyond recognition into the fifteenth state of the Union. But Belue’s The Hunters of Kentucky is not concerned either with the cultural construction of the Kentucky icon, or with Boone himself. Rather, this book purports to be a narrative history of America’s first far west. This fudge is the first and certainly the most serious problem with Belue’s work. Instead of the usual emphasis of story over scholarship that dogs most narrative histories, Belue concentrates on precise historical episodes that give little sense of either a joined-up history or the transformation of Kentucky. Disjointed incident – albeit authentic, compelling, evocative, enigmatic and bloody incident – fills most of the pages. The real purpose of Belue’s book is to recreate the world of the Kentucky Hunter ‘through the eyes and the lives of common, largely unheralded men’ (xiii). This is a worthy task, but in the way that Belue undertakes it, this book, above all, feels written for those who are already competently versed in the larger outlines of Kentucky history.

An illuminating case in point is that of James Harrod. He is one of seemingly countless characters whose name sporadically appears before the reader as if he were a familiar figure when, rightly or wrongly, he hardly leaps off the page. Belue informs the reader on page 77 that ‘Blackbearded James Harrod stood out among this young, mostly clean-shaven crew of bachelors.’ On page 107, he is described as ‘Quiet, bearded, and spare.’ On page 148, Harrod marries widowed Ann Mcdonald – and on page 153, the pair ‘kicked off the first dance’ at Fort Nelson’s 1779 celebrations of George Rogers Clark’s victories over the English. Frequent allusions are also made to Harrod’s Town and its precarious establishment. But who was James Harrod? And why should we care about these intermittent details? And why does the woefully inadequate map in the frontispiece feature a ‘Harrodsburg’, a ‘Fort Harrod’, and a ‘Harrod’s Landing’, but no ‘Harrod’s Town’? The reader of Hunters of Kentucky will come away none the wiser. A quick look at the reference books – in this case, the invaluable Kentucky Encyclopaedia, edited by John E. Kleber – calmly reveals that James Harrod was the leader of the first group to establish a permanent settlement in Kentucky, Harrod’s Town, now Harrodsburg, in 1774. Such research is hardly irksome, but Belue’s narrative makes it essential. Names come so thick and fast, with so few gestures towards an establishing biography or identifying character sketch, that the reader is left to do precisely what Belue set out to avoid: cling to the appearances of celebrities like Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton as fixed points in a dizzying litany of faceless Kentuckians.

This is certainly a shame, since Hunters of Kentucky is a book blessed with virtues that most lazy narratives on the likes of Boone would envy. By and large, it is worth the effort for readers at any level. Belue’s knowledge, and love, of the era and the men is evident on every page. His prodigious research, particularly with the 491 handwritten volumes that comprise the Manuscript Collection of pioneering oral historian Lyman C. Draper, allows these men to talk directly through the ages. At times, particularly in the ‘Interludes’ that separate each chapter, Belue provides the reader with fantastically detailed descriptions of the Kentucky Hunter’s life and equipment that are unparalleled. The Interlude concerned with Braddock’s defeat (59-65), a battle that ties so many important Kentucky figures together, is a particular highlight; oftentimes the reader is able to glimpse a social world in the wilderness that was at once disparate and intimately interconnected. At other moments, the obscurities of his narrative achieve a kind of rough poetry that provides the reader, however mystified, with an impressionistic Kante-Ke, fittingly lonely and secret, that lingers far longer than a more conventional history of Kentucky could hope to (take, as one example of many, the vivid vignette of George Bedinger and Lewis Field’s hunting trip, 191-195). If only the two approaches could have found a better synthesis – or, perhaps, separate works in which their individual merits could shine more brightly. Belue’s own frontier skills are made evident in numerous footnotes. He proudly tells the reader about his experiences graining and brain-tanning deerskins, serving as an extra in Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans, losing part of his thumb to snakebites. But in the final analysis, he is hardly a trustworthy Pathfinder; too often, he sprints ahead with the Long-Knives, tracking paths that are all too obvious to him, whilst his reader is left far behind, struggling with the map and lost in the woods.

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