Border Life

In this original and sensitive ethnography of frontier life, Elizabeth Perkins recovers the rhythms of warfare, subsistence, and cultural encounter that governed existence on the margins of British America. Richly detailed, Border Lifecaptures the intimate perceptive universe of the men and women who colonized Kentucky and southern Ohio during the Revolutionary era. In reconstructing the mental world of border inhabitants, Perkins draws on a pioneering source in oral history. In the 1840s, the Reverend John Dabney Shane conducted hundreds of interviews with surviving western settlers, gathering their recollections on topics ranging from food preparation to encounters with Native Americans. Although Shane's interviews have long been hailed as a rich, if complicated, source for western history, Perkins is the first scholar to consider them critically, as texts for cultural analysis. Border Lifealso deepens our understanding of how ordinary people struggled to make sense of their own lives within the stream of history. Discovering a significant disjuncture between recorded memory and written history in accounts of the early frontier, Perkins shows how historians and popular authors reshaped the messy complexities of remembered experience into heroic--and radically simplified--conquest narratives.

Elizabeth A. Perkins is assistant professor of history at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and former curator of the Kentucky Historical Society.

ContentsAcknowledgments A Note on Editorial Policy Introduction1. What They Themselves Know 2. Views of the Western Country 3. Distinctions and Partitions amongst Us 4. The Politics of Power 5. Indian TimesAppendix A. Item List of John D. Shane's "Historical Collections" Appendix B. John D. Shane's Interview with Jane Stevenson, [ca. 1841-1842] Notes Bibliography IndexIllustrations 1. The Ohio River Basin 2. John Dabney Shane, ca. 1850s 3. Printed broadside, 1838 4. Page from John D. Shane's interview with William Clinkenbeard, ca. 1841-43 5. "A New Map of the Western Parts of Virginia," by Thomas Hutchins, 1778 6. "This Map of Kentucke," by John Filson, 1784 7. Plan of fort at Boonesborough in 1778 8. "Spring Station Built in 1780" 9. Detail of Filson's map, 1784 10. Plan of Constant's Station in 1785 11. William Whitley's house (completed before 1794)Tables 1. Geographic Origins of John Shane's Informants 2. Dates of Birth of John Shane's Informants 3. Dates of Arrival of John Shane's Informants 4. Ages at Arrival of John Shane's Informants 5. Ages of John Shane's Informants in 1843 6. Estimates of the Racial and Ethnic Origins of Kentucky's Population, 1790 7. Estimates of Wealth-Holding for Kentucky Heads of Households, 1792-1800