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I was born March 31, 1760, as per Register, in chesterfield county, Virginia, 15 Miles from the city of Richmond. My Progenitors was from France. My Grandfather Anthony Trabue Fled from France in the year of our lord 1687 at a time of a bloody persicution against the Desenters by the Roman Catholicks.1
Thus Daniel Trabue (1760-1840) begins the memories of his life. This manuscript was transcribed in 1827 in the little town of Columbia, Kentucky, of which Trabue was a founder. Trabue, of French extraction, grew up in colonial Virginia and at the end of the Revolutionary War chose to go back with his family into the Kentucky wilderness-where he had fought Indians and redcoats-to establish himself in the upper Green River country, making his fortune in the name of an ideal America (the Columbia for whom his town was named) and deciding to tell his story by writing down his memories.
Unlike other written recollections by common people, Trabue's manuscript did not remain a family document: it was preserved by Lyman Copeland Draper in his collection of manuscripts on the history of the American West. The earliest publication of part of the 148 pages in Draper's possession was in two issues of the weekly Richmond Standard in May 1879. But only the first six pages of the manuscript found a place in that newspaper. Another partial edition of the narrative was published in 1916 by Lillie DuPuy VanCulin Harper with the title Colonial Men and Times, but as the great-grandniece of Daniel Trabue, she dwelt primarily on the genealogy of the Trabue family, omitting part of the text. Finally, in 1981, Chester Raymond Young, who had heard of Trabue's text during his childhood in the city of Columbia, put together the entire manuscript in an edition that not only maintains the original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of the document, but brings to the surface all the force of this narrative through notes and descriptions of the people involved in the story.2
A couple of important questions arise. How did Daniel Trabue decide to write his memories at the age of sixty-seven? And why? The first answer one might think of is the easiest. Perhaps he had told and retold his story orally over...