Frances Hunter

blog of the author To the Ends of the Earth

 

Frances Hunter's Journal
June 2008

Winner, Violet Crown Award for Fiction

Silver Medal Winner, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Finalist, Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Awards

 

Check our MySpace page too!

June 25, 2008: Murder and Madness in the Lewis Family

In 1812, three years after Meriwether Lewis died under mysterious circumstances along the Natchez Trace, his mentor Thomas Jefferson wrote of him in a biographical sketch:

Governor Lewis had from early life been subject to hypochondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name, and were more immediately inherited by him from his father. They had not however been so strong as to give uneasiness to his family. While he lived with me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind, but knowing their constitutional source, I estimated their course by what I had seen in the family.

Jefferson was related to the Lewis family by marriage, and from the time he first heard about Meriwether's death, he believed that Lewis had committed suicide as a result of an inherited tendency towards depression and mental disturbance from the Lewises. Subsequent events could only have reinforced Jefferson's feelings, for at the time he wrote this sketch of Meriwether, the former president was reeling from the news of a bizarre and scandalous murder committed by his own nephews, Lilburn and Isham Lewis.

Jefferson's sister Lucy and her husband, Charles Lewis, had moved from Virginia to Smithland, Kentucky, in 1808, hoping to escape financial troubles and personal unhappiness. Unfortunately for the luckless Lucy, she died soon after, leaving three unmarried daughters. Apparently, Charles Lewis wasn't much help, for leadership of the family seems to have passed to her oldest son, Randolph, himself the father of eight children. In another blow, Randolph and his wife also soon died.

At that point, the responsibility fell on Lilburn Lewis, a widower with five children of his own. If he did in fact have a genetic predisposition to depression, it would be little wonder if Lilburn succumbed, burdened as he was with a staggering amount of debt and responsibility. Lilburn apparently took to drinking and spending most of his time with his younger brother Isham, who had come to live with the family in Smithland after bumming around St. Louis and Natchez, unable to find work despite his family connections.

Lilburn Lewis's frustrations took a murderous turn on December 15, 1811. A 17-year-old slave named George accidentally broke a pitcher of water. Enraged, Lilburn called in all the slaves to watch and then, using a hatchet, killed George before their eyes. Then, he stuffed George's body into the fireplace and attempted to burn it.

Although it was illegal to murder a slave, Lilburn might have gotten away with the crime if not for an incredible series of events by Mother Nature. 1811 was one of the most bizarre years in history for natural phenomena: floods, droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes all assailed the country. A comet appeared in April and remained visible all year; an eclipse in September seemed to fortell the outbreak of war with the Indians at Tippecanoe. The already-fantastical passenger pigeon population exploded to record numbers, and mobs of squirrels ran into the Ohio River and drowned by the thousands.

Then, in the early morning hours of December 16, even as poor George's body lay smoldering in the fireplace, a magnitude-8 earthquake centered around the town of New Madrid, Missouri, ripped through the Ohio valley. The quake was so violent that the Mississippi River actually flowed backward. In Kentucky, where the Lewises lived, the quake came with a deafening roar that threw settlers from their beds and caused major damage to fences, bridges, cabins, and brick homes.

Lilburn's chimney collapsed. He ordered his slaves to rebuild it and brick up the body of George inside. The slaves had no choice. However, the New Madrid earthquakes had only begun, and they would expose Lilburn's crime for the world to see. Two more magnitude-8 quakes were to follow, one on January 23, 1812, and the final and most devastating on February 7. Lilburn's chimney tumbled to the ground, and a dog unearthed George's remains and carried away his skull. When a neighbor saw the grisly find, he called the sheriff, and Lilburn and Isham were arrested for George's murder.

Justice was never served, however. Out on bail, the Lewis brothers made a suicide pact and, on April 9, 1812, met in the family cemetery in Smithland with their rifles. Later, Isham claimed that Lilburn accidentally shot himself while showing Isham how to use the rifle. Shortly thereafter, Isham absconded from the scene and never contacted his family again; his final fate remains unknown.

Needless to say, the affair was a terrible embarrassment to the Lewis and Jefferson families, and it's no surprise that Jefferson would find himself brooding over Meriwether's fate as he penned the biography of his "beloved man," and wondering about the internal forces that may have driven him to his death.

Want to know more? There is a good full-length book on the affair called Jefferson’s Nephews, by Boynton Merrill, Jr. (1976). On the literary side, the great American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren explored this scandal in his epic poem about Lewis and Jefferson, Brother to Dragons (1953, revised 1979).

Note: I originally learned about the Lilburn and Isham affair from a great article on the Wofford University website, but the page is no longer in existence.

June 19, 2008: The Chickasaw Agency

Though they were never a big tribe, the Chickasaw Indians loomed large in the history of the early frontier. The Natchez Trace ran through the heart of Chickasaw territory, a fact which plays a major role in To the Ends of the Earth as Meriwether Lewis travels that path. In our current work-in-progress, The Fairest Portion of the Globe, Chickasaws play an even larger role.

On his last journey, Lewis traveled from Chickasaw Bluffs (present-day Memphis) in the company of Major James Neelly, a somewhat shadowy figure who was the federal agent to the Chickasaw nation. To get to the agency, Lewis and Neelly would have had to follow no easy pathway, but a rough, briar-choked trail through central Mississippi called Pigeon Roost Road. Neelly's agency lay along the Natchez Trace about 100 miles south of the Tennessee line, adjacent to the principal Chickasaw village, a place called Chuckalissa or Big Town (present-day Tupelo, Mississippi).

If you visit the Natchez Trace today, you'll find several stops along the parkway where you can learn about the agency, Big Town, and the Chickasaw lifestyle. Big Town was situated in a large open valley. It consisted of about three hundred log cabins and huts, extensive corn and tobacco fields, and orchards of apples and peaches. These extensive agricultural enterprises were tended by the Chickasaws themselves and their African-American slaves.

As the Chickasaw agent under Thomas Jefferson, Major Neelly would have had many duties. As you might expect, he enforced federal law in the territory with regard to intruders, traders, contraband, and treaty provisions. He watched out for any foreign intrigue from the British and the Spanish, still a strong possibility in those years. Neelly would also have been expected to bring "civilization" to the Chickasaws--not that they needed it--and encourage the Indians to believe that they should sell off their excess land to whites in order to concentrate on their own farms.

Apparently, Neelly wasn't any too comfortable as the Chickasaw agent. In August 1809, he wrote to Secretary of War William Eustis asking for a loan, saying that he'd found the "old agency house untenable" and needed money for a new one "to put my family in." Did his financial straits make Neelly vulnerable to the very intrigue he was charged with preventing? What role did he play in the death of Meriwether Lewis, whom he was supposed to be looking after?

These are questions that history has no answers for, but as historical novelists we loved exploring.

June 13, 2008: H.M.S. Ulysses

During World War II, the United States not only fought in the war, but used its massive manufacturing capabilities to supply vast amounts of war materiel to the other Allies. But how were all these aircraft, tanks, Jeeps, trucks, guns, explosives, etc. delivered? Who delivered them, and what was the price to pay?

H.M.S. Ulysses, by Alistair MacLean, is a high-powered and extremely moving novel woven around the crew of one Royal Navy cruiser serving as an escort for a vital convoy of U.S. merchant ships heading for the Russian port of Murmansk. MacLean served on two Arctic convoys during the war, and H.M.S. Ulysses is saturated with real-life details, from the incredible cold to the constant peril from German U-boats and air bombardment to the threats to the Ulysses from within, as human beings break down under the soul-destroying pressure of the war.

The challenge in any World War II novel is to take a conflict that was so huge and find a way to humanize and personalize it. Here MacLean really excels. Though there are many characters to follow on the Ulysses, and we know little about their lives before the war, I was drawn in at once by the vivid, compassionate, and often heart-breaking dramas that surround each of the officers and men. All of the characters seem real, and some of them, especially the droll "Kapok Kid," irascible Dr. Brooks, and scholarly Captain Vallery--the very epitome of a Christian gentleman--are truly unforgettable.

MacLean offers enough excitement and action to make your heart stop. You will lose sleep while reading this book! But there is much more to this novel than a ripping adventure story. H.M.S. Ulysses is based on a real 1942 convoy which was almost completely destroyed by the enemy (25 out of 36 ships sent to the bottom of the sea). About half-way through the book, MacLean includes an incredible short essay about "the testing time when every man stood out clearly for what he was":

And for the crew of a mutiny ship, for men already tried and condemned, for physically broken and mentally scourged men who neither could or would ever be the same again in body or mind, the men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame. Not all, of course: they were only human; but many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb, he never looked back to that other side.

You don't have to have an interest in, or knowledge of, the arctic convoys to appreciate this book. H.M.S. Ulysses is a beautiful, powerful, and tragically simple story, and easily the most impressive fiction book I have read this year.

June 4, 2008: Backbone of the World

The fur trade played a pivotal role in the development of the American West. From the 1600s, France and England had competed for the best spots to trap beaver and other fur-bearing animals and ship the pelts home for enormous profits. Certainly the opportunity for America to join in this seemingly inexhaustible fur bonanza was one of the reasons that President Jefferson was eager for Lewis & Clark to stake U.S. claims to the Upper Missouri and the Rocky Mountains.

While I knew this historical background, I'd never given much thought to the young men who actually ventured into the wilderness and lived as mountain men. Who were they? Why did they choose to live such a hard life? How did they learn what to do in time to survive? What would it have actually been like to leave behind everything familiar and live such a free and elemental life?

Backbone of the World by Edward Louis Henry is a fine historical novel that tells story of one such young man. Temple Buck grows up a typical kid on the Ohio frontier, but when he gets in a terrible scrape following his first sexual experience with his randy aunt, he is forced to flee home lest he be shot by his outraged uncle! The naive Temple ends up being shanghaied into near-slavery by the notorious riverman Mike Fink, but eventually manages to get free of Fink in St. Louis, where he learns a thing or two from a beautiful mixed-race madam. All good times must come to an end, however, and it just so happens that William Ashley is advertising for one hundred good men to go up the Missouri River to establish a new fur trapping company. Game for a new adventure, Temple joins up...

By placing Temple in the midst of the 1822 Ashley expedition, Henry takes his readers on an exciting, picaresque, and often hilarious journey into the unknown. Henry writes the book as a first-person "memoir" by Temple, and through his eyes we meet some of the most legendary characters in the fur trade and experience real-life incidents ranging from natural disasters to battles with the Sioux, Arikara, and Blackfeet. But the real strength of Backbone of the World lies in the incredible realism of its details. Henry is a mountain man reenactor as well a writer; perhaps that accounts for his ability to channel historical and cultural details into a completely absorbing depiction of the past.

I found myself forgetting that this book was a new novel written by a modern-day author. In terms of creating a fully realized alternate world of the past, Backbone of the World is a near-masterpiece, bringing to life the passion and humor of a young man learning about horses, rivers, the wilderness, and women for the first time. The storytelling is some of the most vivid and robust I've encountered in quite a while. I was amazed by Henry's talent for limiting the narration to only what Temple would think and feel. This includes his attitudes towards Indians and towards the animals he traps. Henry offers no winking commentary or political correctness to cater to modern sensibilities. This decision infuses the book with integrity and rare authenticity.

Not everything about Backbone of the World works perfectly. Henry overuses dialect, especially at the beginning. The book is quite long (and is the first of a trilogy). It wouldn't have hurt the story to have consolidated a few of the Indian raids (here come the Crow Indians! Again!) But I suspect that Henry is following a real-life historical source and chose not to take artistic license.

These are minor flaws in a novel that should have wide appeal to all ages. Backbone of the World is a skillful and compelling historical drama that brings to life a lost era in American history. Because it's independently published, it can be a bit hard to find, but make the effort if you want to read a roaring good tale full of drama, fun, and masterful historical detail.

Older journal entries

Copyright © Frances Hunter | Design by brampamp