In the near future, I’m planning to fill in additional portions of the Sackett family saga, including the story of the Sacketts in the Revolutionary War and Tell Sackett’s early experiences in the Tennessee mountains and his service in the Sixth Cavalry during the Civil War.
Listed below are some additional points of interest about selected people and events written about inJubal Sackett:
GRASSY COVE:The place where Jubal broke his leg and survived until Keokotah returned for him is a lovely spot. Jubal intended future Sacketts to locate there, only a few miles from the Crab Orchard area where Barnabas met his death.
MAMMOTH, MASTODON, etc.:According to scholars mammoths died out around 6000 B.C. Nonetheless, American Indians record hunting and killing them. One such report occurs in the Bureau of Ethnology reportThe Ponca Tribe . Returning from their “long hunt” west to the Rockies, the Poncas saw a mammoth, as well as what was probably a giant ground sloth, near what is now Niobrara, Nebraska.
David Thompson, the distinguished Hudson’s Bay Co. explorer, on January 7, 1811, came upon some tracks near the Athabasca River in the northern Rockies which the Indians told him were those of a mammoth. The Indians had assured him the animal was to be found there. Many Indian tribes had accounts of seeing or hunting the mammoth.
Near Moab, at Hys Bottom close to the Colorado River, there is a petroglyph of a mastodon. And in the Four Corners area near Flora Vista a small boy found two slabs on which were carved many glyphs, including pictures of two elephants. They have been called fakes, which is the most convenient way of getting rid of something that does not fit current beliefs.
PRINCE MADOC:Prince Madoc’s existence is doubted by many (not by me), and much has been written from time to time. Perhaps the best account isMadoc, and the Discovery of America, by Richard Deacon.
ROMAN COINS:Several Roman coins have been found in Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky. Comments on these are made in Judge Haywood’sNatural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee. This history covers white settlements up to 1768 and was published in 1823. Haywood also comments on burials of bodies with blue eyes and auburn hair, wrapped in hides and left in caves.
TENNESSEE:Ramsey, in hisAnnals of Tennessee, says: “At the time of its first exploration, Tennessee was a vast and almost unoccupied wilderness—a solitude over which an Indian hunter seldom roamed, and to which no tribe put in a distinct and well-defined claim.”
One hundred years before Daniel Boone, James Needham was sent into Tennessee to explore the possibilities of trade, traveling there in 1673. He had been sent by a trader, Abraham Wood, whose previous expedition in 1671 had provided too little information. With Needham was a young indentured servant, Gabriel Arthur, who was left behind to learn the Cherokee language.
About the Author
“I think of myself in the oral tradition — of a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way I’d like to be remembered — as a storyteller. A good storyteller.”
It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world recreated in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.
Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L’Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, “always on the frontier.” As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.
Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, assessment miner, and officer on tank destroyers during World War II. During his “yondering” days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel,Hondo , in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 100 books is in print; there are nearly 230 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.
His hardcover bestsellers includeThe Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel)Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed , andThe Haunted Mesa . His memoir,Education of a Wandering Man , was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio Publishing.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life’s work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.
Louis L’Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L’Amour tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the nineties — among them, four Hopalong Cassidy novels:The Rustlers of West Fork, The Trail to Seven Pines, The Riders of High Rock, andTrouble Shooter .
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Jubal Sackett (1985) Page 32
