Economists would have called it a “depressed area.” A land of marginal and submarginal farms, small coal-mine operations, third-growth timber cutting, crossroad market towns like Shawnee, seat of Shawnee County. Haunted country—haunted by the ghosts of the Indians who gave the place its title, who left little but their name when they were driven out late in the eighteenth century by a Colonel George Rogers Clark who burned their villages, torched their cornfields and ruined the survivors with smallpox, alcohol and tuberculosis.

Inconsolable Memories:

Pump and pump handle sheathed in ice on winter mornings; my first chore of the day, recalled Henry, was taking a hot kettle from the kitchen stove to thaw and prime that pump and fill the kitchen water buckets.

Herding in the milk cows on frosty mornings, I’d stand where the cows had lain to keep my bare feet warm.

With a green willow stick, whipping a crab apple halfway across the valley, I aimed at my big brother, Will, or at little brother, Paul, or at our baby sister, Marcie.

The smell of the flowering dogwood in April.

Summer: heat lightning. Thunder above the hayfield. Fireflies and lightning bugs. The June bug game. The leap from crossbeam into haymow twenty feet above the floor, high in the dusty air of the barn.

Dumping wooden ashes into the two-hole privy below the house—another of my childhood chores. Will had graduated to harnessing our team of horses to the plow, the spring-tooth harrow, the manure spreader, the seed drill, the cultivator, the mower, the wagon. But Will was a precocious boy, big for his age; he always worked hard. He liked it.

Splitting kindling wood for the kitchen stove, after I’d pumped two buckets of water. Hewer of wood and drawer of water—that was my role for years, until Paul grew big enough to do it in his turn.

Our half-Shawnee grandmother—Milly Cornflower Lightcap—was the daughter of a medicine man known to the whites as Doctor Jim (a condescending honorific) because of his healing arts and herbal lore. Doctor Jim never revealed his secret tribal name, not to any kin of ours; there was dangerous power in the name, easily lost. He lived alone in a one-room cabin in the woods, last of the Shawnee full bloods, and survived for eighty years by trapping, hunting, poaching, by odd jobs, charity and scavenging, and by his medical skills, much in demand locally. When he died he died alone, chanting (we presume) his personal death song, and lamenting the destruction and exile of his people. Never did go to Oklahoma. Never did join the cash nexus. Never did get baptized.

Grandmother Cornflower was half white by ancestry, her mother an indentured servant named Tillie Ostrander who’d run away from a family of Pennsylvania Dutch (Germans) in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Tillie crossed over the mountains and allowed herself to become the third or fourth wife (he outlived them all) of Doctor Jim. It was tolerable then for a white man to take an Indian girl as wife—not honorable but tolerable—but for an all-white girl to bed down with an Indian, a buck savage, a male aborigine, a witch doctor, and to love him, stay with him, refuse to leave him even when her brothers came looking for her all the way from beyond the Allegheny Mountains—that was a shameful thing. A thing to be spoken of in whispers. A disgrace near as low—not quite—as Negro blood.