I remember seeing this film not long after it came out in 1957. It's still one of my all-time favorites and is a great depiction of early Australia. I'd be interested to hear from anyone else who has seen it.
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It’s 2016 and there’s wild optimism in the air. A new year, a new start. We pledge ourselves to new behaviors, commit ourselves to doing what we’ve failed our whole lives to do. We see a fresh beginning because the calendar permits, even encourages it. That’s all so wonderful but I say screw resolutions. You don’t need to make promises you can’t keep or to state things that move from willful intentions to utter lies. No, you need only vow to change things – actions, views, attitudes – when the time feels right and when the circumstances dictate it. The first of January need not roll around for you to take control of your life. But if you insist, try following any of these resolutions. If not now, embrace them January 17 or March 26 – or any date and year that fits your true needs and desires: 1. Vow to write more often, though quality is to be prized over quantity. 2. Promise to do better at meeting writing deadlines. 3. Commit to promoting and marketing your writing. 4. Resolve to be a better reader. What you read can influence and inform your writings. 5. Promise to help others read books, whether a child, a blind person, someone with a learning disorder, an ESL student, or an illiterate. 6. Swear you will support your local reading economy and community – visit bookstores, libraries, and cultural centers. 7. Give the gift of books to others – literally. No need to wait for Christmas to give books or bookstore gift cards to people. Do the same for birthdays and other special occasions. 8. Study the English language. Writers are in charge of preserving it. Begin by properly learning it. While you are at it, vow to increase your vocabulary. 9. Resolve to get a good editor. Writers simply can’t get dressed without one. 10. Pledge to write something useful, interesting and original. Good enough is not good. Raise the bar and write beyond your perceived abilities. 2016 – and all years – holds the promise of being better than last year or better than many, most, or all years before. Live each day fully and whether you promise to lose weight, make money stop a bad habit, or commit to doing more charity, always vow to be better at your writing craft. Your career or legacy doesn’t just depend on it – the quality of your readers’ lives and society depends on it. Happy New Year! Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at [email protected]. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2016
Release of my latest book, the second in the Kramer & Shadow Crime Thriller series, originally planned for mid-December 2015 has been moved to early 2016. Watch this space for updates!!
Reviews are beginning to come in... "You Can Run is replete with myriad surprises that keep the reader’s heart racing. Kramer and Shadow find themselves unraveling a case that goes so much deeper than the kidnapping of several young girls. Kramer knows that the evil hand of Valdiron and Harper is all over this mystery, but despite Kramer’s best efforts, one of them makes it out alive." Paulette Kinnes "I thoroughly enjoyed reading your novel. I couldn't put it down, it is riveting, with action and suspense at every turn. The characters are likable and engaging. The story is well written and thought provoking." Taevyn Johnson Any more than that won't make any difference, say researchers In news that could flood marital bedrooms around the globe with waves of either relief or anxiety, researchers have found that sex once a week is the optimum amount for maximizing happiness. Couples having sex more than once a week do not report being any happier, according to a new study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, but couples having it less than once a week report being less happy. The study was based on an analysis of the results of surveys of more than 30,000 Americans collected over 40 years in three different projects. It’s the first study that finds that copulation could be one of those activities that offers diminishing returns. Before looking up from this and glaring at your spouse, however, be aware that this research and most experts stress that sex is not a one-size-fits-all arrangement—one person’s feast is another’s starvation diet. Moreover, any study of happiness must perforce be about correlation and not causation. It’s possible that people in happy relationships have sex once a week, rather than vice versa. Or that people are happy having sex once a week because they think that’s what everybody else is having. (For single people, in case you were wondering, there seems to be no consistent association between sexual frequency and happiness.) The results of the new study are somewhat surprising, as previous investigations into the science of sex had suggested that as far as nooky went, more was always better. “Most people strive to be happier and sex is one aspect of life that is thought to be associated with greater happiness,” says Amy Muise, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study. She also notes that the media, from movies to music to news reports, has generally echoed the abundance theory. But, taking a cue partly from the work of Nobel Prize winning economists Daniel Kahnemann and Angus Deaton, who found that after $75,000 more wealth was not associated with greater happiness, she hypothesized that the same might be true for sex. And according to her results, it is. “We found that sexual frequency was associated with greater well-being up to about once a week for the average person,” says Muise. “Having sex more frequently than once a week was not associated with greater well-being.”
The good news for players is that more sex wasn’t associated with lower well-being either, but having sex less than once a week was definitely associated with a drop-off in contentment. In fact, the study found that the difference in life satisfaction between couples who had sex less than once a month and those who had it once a week was bigger than the difference between couples who were quite poor, making between $15,000 to $25,000 annually, and those who were much wealthier, making between $50,000 and $75,000. However, despite the apparent happiness gains that more sex can bring, the sluggish sales of Addyi—the so-called women’s Viagra—have also suggested that high frequency rolls in the hay are not top of everybody’s must do list. “Desire is too abstract to measure,” Thea Cacchioni, a sociologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, recently told Bloomberg News. “It’s a really recent idea that we should have a high sex desire all the time,” she continued. “We now feel a lot of pressure if we don’t meet the kind of hypersexuality we see in the media.” Muise says she is still exploring why one appears to be the magic number. “Once a week tends to be the average frequency among established couples so it’s possible that this is the average because more frequent sex is not associated with greater well-being,” she says. “It’s also possible that people feel happy when they think they are at or above the average frequency.” But there’s not a lot of evidence that suggests people are aware how often others are having sex. “Once a week may also be the frequency that people feel is enough to maintain their intimate connection,” she adds. John Updike wrote that sex is like money; only too much is enough. Muise’s research seems to suggest that maybe sex is indeed like money, just in the opposite direction: only too little is bad. A study shows that giggling in tandem is a good indicator the relationship's going to last.
Study after study has shown that laughing is good for the soul. But now we know something else: sharing giggles with a romantic partner keeps the lovey-dovey feelings going, according to a study published in the journal Personal Relationships. Laura Kurtz, a social psychologist from the University of North Carolina, has long been fascinated by the idea of shared laughter in romantic relationships. “We can all think of a time when we were laughing and the person next to us just sat there totally silent,” she says. “All of a sudden that one moment takes a nosedive. We wonder why the other person isn’t laughing, what’s wrong with them, or maybe what’s wrong with us, and what might that mean for our relationship.” Kurtz set out to figure out the laugh-love connection by collecting 77 heterosexual pairs (154 people total) who had been in a relationship for an average of 4 years. She and her team did video recordings of them recalling how they first met. Meanwhile, her team counted instances of spontaneous laughing, measured when the couple laughed together as well as how long that instant lasted. Each couple also completed a survey about their relational closeness. “In general, couples who laugh more together tend to have higher-quality relationships,” she says. “We can refer to shared laughter as an indicator of greater relationship quality.” It seems common sense that people who laugh together are likely happier couples, and that happier couples would have a longer, healthier, more vital relationship—but the role that laughter plays isn’t often center stage. “Despite how intuitive this distinction may seem, there’s very little research out there on laughter’s relational influence within a social context,” Kurtz says. “Most of the existing work documents laughter’s relevance to individual outcomes or neglects to take the surrounding social context into account.” Kurtz noted that some gender patterns emerged that have been reported by previous studies. “Women laughed more than males,” she notes. “And men’s laughs are more contagious: When men laugh, they are 1.73 times more likely to make their partner laugh.” There’s also evidence that laughing together is a supportive activity. “Participants who laughed more with their partners during a recorded conversation in the lab tended to also report feeling closer to and more supported by their partners,” she says. On the flip side, awkward chuckles, stunted grins and fake guffaws all are flags that there may be something amiss. This harkens back to a classic psychological experiment conducted in 1992, where 52 couples were recorded telling their personal, shared histories. The team noted whether the couples were positive and effusive or were more withdrawn and tired in telling these stories, then checked in with the couples three years later. They saw a correlation in how couples told stories about their past and the success of their partnership: the more giddy the couple was about a story, the more likely they remained together; the less enthusiastic the couple was, the more likely the couple’s partnership had crumbled. While there are cultural differences in laughter display—Kurtz says that Eastern cultures tend to display appreciation with close-mouthed smiles, not the heartier, toothy laughs that are more Western—there’s no question that laughter is important. “Moments of shared laughter are potent for a relationship,” she says. “They bring a couple closer together.” BY GEORGE ORWELL June 16, 1946 Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to airplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are four specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written. These passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad—I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary: (1) I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate. —Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression). (2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a lossfor bewilder. —Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa). (3) On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? —Essay on psychology in Politics (New York). (4) All the “best people” from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. —Communist pamphlet Each of these passages has faults of its own, but quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing; as soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged: Dying metaphors: A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a “rift,” for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Operators, Or verbal false limbs: These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such asbreak, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such asprove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination ofinstead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un-formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, the fact that, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anti-climax by such refunding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, etc. Pretentious diction: Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual basic, primary, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on anarchaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, trident, sword, shield, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, status quo, gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g. and etc.,there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, clandestine, subaqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, lackeys, flunkey, mad dog. White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind(deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness. Meaningless words: In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice,have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy,not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: Consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot. The Soviet Press is the freest in the world. The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with the intent to deceive. Others words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well known verse from “Ecclesiastes”: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Here it is in modern English: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit three, on page 872, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations—race, battle, bread—dissolve into the vague phrase “success or failure in competitive activities.” This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing—no one capable of using phrases like “objective consideration of contemporary phenomena’’—would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say/think.When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images dash—as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot—it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the [printer’s] slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to lookegregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3) if one takes an uncharitable attitude toward it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning—they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another—but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear. A new study, published Thursday in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that the old adage that people over 30 are happier than teenagers and young adults may no longer be true.
Looking at data from the 1970s through the present, the authors of the study found that until recently, adults over age 30 reported being happier that did young adults and teens. But “adolescents in recent years were happier than adolescents in previous decades,” the authors write. As a result, the gap has closed between the two groups’ self-reported happiness levels. All the data analyzed by the researchers was self-reported by the study participants. The study authors propose some reasons this could be the case: “Cultural shifts toward individualism may favor adolescence, a time of self-focus… The weakening of social ties (such as the lower marriage rate), economic circumstances such as the Great Recession, and growing income inequality may also have a larger impact on adults than on adolescents.” Still, one in three American adults reported being “very happy.” Click here to see how my latest book would be rated on the big screen.
YOU CAN RUN due for release mid-December In 1713, Boone’s father, a weaver and blacksmith, journeyed from his hometown of Bradninch, England, to the colony of Pennsylvania, established by William Penn in 1681 as a haven for religious tolerance. Like Penn, Squire Boone belonged to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, a group whose members faced persecution in England for their beliefs. In 1720, Squire married fellow Quaker Sarah Morgan and Daniel, the sixth of the couple’s 11 children, was born in 1734 in present-day Berks County, Pennsylvania. In the 1740s, two of the oldest Boone children wed “worldlings,” or non-Quakers, and were disowned by the local Quaker community. After Squire Boone refused to publicly apologize for the second of these two marriages, he too was kicked out of the Quakers. He subsequently left Pennsylvania with his family in 1750 and traveled by wagon to the colony of North Carolina, where in 1753 he purchased two tracts of land near present-day Mocksville. In 1775, Boone and a group of some 30 woodsmen left to complete a 200-mile trail through the wilderness to the Cumberland Gap—a natural break in the rugged Appalachian Mountains—and into Kentucky. Boone had been hired for the job by Richard Henderson, a North Carolinian who along with a group of investors planned to establish a colony called Transylvania in an area comprising much of present-day Kentucky and part of present-day Tennessee. After Boone blazed the trail, which became known as the Wilderness Road, he helped establish one of Kentucky’s earliest settlements, Boonesborough, which became Transylvania’s capital. The Transylvania colony was short-lived; in 1778, the Virginia General Assembly voided the deal Henderson had struck with the Cherokees for the land. Nevertheless, the Wilderness Road became the gateway by which an estimated 200,000 settlers journeyed to the western frontier by the early 19th century. Among those emigrants was Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather, who in 1779 traveled the Wilderness Road from Virginia to Kentucky, where America’s 16th president was born in 1809. In February 1778, while Boone was traveling with a group of Boonesborough men along Kentucky’s Licking River, he was captured by a group of Shawnees. The Indians took him to their village in Ohio, where he was adopted by Shawnee chief Blackfish to take the place of one of his sons who’d been killed. Boone, who was given the name Sheltowee, or Big Turtle, was treated relatively well by his captors—he was allowed to hunt and may have had a Shawnee wife—but they kept a close eye on him. In June 1778 he managed to escape and make his way back to Boonesborough, where he warned residents that the natives, upset because settlers had moved onto their Kentucky hunting grounds, were planning to attack. That September, over the course of nine days and nights, a group of Shawnees and other Native Americans laid siege to Boonesborough, but the outnumbered settlers managed to hold them off. The victory at Boonesborough helped spark a new wave of emigrants to Kentucky, some of them personally recruited and led there by Boone. Boone was transformed from a local hero into someone who was internationally famous when his story was included in a book, “The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke,” published in 1784. The book was written by John Filson, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher turned Kentucky land speculator, in an effort to lure settlers to Kentucky. The author, who interviewed Boone, presented the frontiersman’s adventures in what were supposedly his own words, although the embellished language belonged to Filson. The book proved popular in both America and Europe, where readers were captivated by Boone’s story. After Boone’s death in 1820, his legend continued to grow with the publication of such best-selling works as “The Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky,” released in 1833. In this sensationalized account of Boone’s life, author Timothy Flint portrayed him as a ferocious Indian slayer who engaged in hand-to-hand combat and swung on vines to elude capture; in reality, Boone had friendly relationships with a number of Native Americans and claimed to have killed just a few of them. Although Boone helped open up Kentucky to thousands of settlers, he ultimately was unsuccessful when it came to securing his own piece of the pie. During the 1780s and 1790s, he worked as a surveyor in Kentucky while also investing in real estate. However, his efforts as a land speculator failed to make him rich. Boone ended up getting swindled in some deals and in other cases failed to properly register his land claims. He got hit with lawsuits for selling property to which he didn’t have valid title and also got sued for producing faulty surveys. Boone even received death threats after his testimony in various court cases resulted in people losing their land claims. Boone tried, but largely failed, at other business ventures as well. He owned a store and tavern in Limestone (present-day Maysville); served as a supplier of ginseng root (the market eventually collapsed, leaving him in debt); and bought horses with the intention of reselling them (before this could happen a number of the animals escaped). By the late 1790s, Boone had soured on Kentucky and decided to leave. In 1799, Boone, then in his mid-60s, moved with his extended family from Kentucky, which achieved statehood in 1792, to present-day Missouri, then under Spanish control and known as Upper Louisiana. The Spanish, who wanted to encourage settlement in the area, welcomed Boone with military honors and granted him 850 acres of land in the Femme Osage district, west of St. Louis. They also waived the requirement that all immigrants had to be Roman Catholic and made Boone a syndic, or magistrate, of the Femme Osage district, responsible for settling disputes among settlers. In 1800, the Spanish ceded the Louisiana Territory to France, and three years later the U.S. gained control of it with the Louisiana Purchase. Boone subsequently lost his land claims because he hadn’t followed the proper procedures to gain permanent title to the land. After the frontiersman petitioned Congress, President James Madison signed a bill into law in 1814 giving Boone his 850 acres; however, he soon had to sell the property to pay off Kentuckians who’d heard the news about the grant and traveled to Missouri to collect on old debts. Missouri became America’s 24th state in 1821, a year after Boone’s death. Boone has often been portrayed sporting a hat made from the skin and fur of a raccoon, but in fact the frontiersman thought this type of headgear was unstylish and instead donned hats made from beaver. According to Boone biographer John Mack Faragher, the myth of the coonskin cap can be traced to a full-length portrait of Boone made in 1820 by Chester Harding, who authentically depicted the frontiersman wearing leggings, moccasins and a fringed hunting shirt and holding a beaver hat. The painting was displayed in the Kentucky capitol for several decades until it deteriorated. Harding later cut out Boone’s head and pasted it onto a different background; however, a record of Boone’s outfit was preserved thanks to artist James Otto Lewis, who had produced an engraving of Harding’s original painting. Lewis hired an actor, Noah Ludlow, to help sell prints made from the engraving, and when Ludlow later performed a show that required him to dress like a frontiersman he modeled his costume after Boone’s wardrobe in the engraving. Unable to find a beaver hat, he substituted it with a coonskin cap. Ludlow’s performances were a success and the coonskin cap’s association with Boone stuck. Boone died on September 26, 1820, in present-day Defiance, Missouri. He remained active into old age, unsuccessfully volunteering to fight in the War of 1812 and going on his last big hunt just a few years before he passed away. Boone was buried in a graveyard near Marthasville, Missouri, next to his wife, Rebecca. In 1845, the owners of a cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky, convinced the Boones’ descendants to allow Daniel and Rebecca’s remains to be reinterred in the Bluegrass State. The Frankfort cemetery was new and its owners were interested in drumming up publicity; they also promised to erect a monument to Boone at the new burial site.
An elaborate reinterment ceremony was held, featuring the governor of Kentucky and other dignitaries. However, charges eventually surfaced that Boone’s Missouri grave had been poorly marked and the wrong remains were dug up and reburied in Kentucky. In 1983, a forensic anthropologist examined a cast made of Boone’s supposed skull before the reburial and announced it was possibly that of an African-American man rather than a Caucasian one. When a second forensics expert later studied the cast of the skull, though, she decided it wasn’t in good enough condition to serve as the basis for any scientific conclusions. You don’t need anyone else’s approval or permission to enjoy the magic of writing — of sitting by yourself, figuring out which words should go together to express whatever it is you’re trying to say. It’s OK to let your book be published if you can see its flaws but don’t know how to fix them. Don’t let your book be published if it still contains flaws that are fixable, even if fixing them is a lot of work.
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Greg Smith -AuthorI have 30+ years as a graphic designer under my belt. During that time I've worked on countless books; designing covers, layout, etc. Now I've decided to "go behind the camera." Now I'm trying my hand at writing. Archives
March 2017
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