Bloody Ground: Stories of Mystery and Intrigue from Kentucky

Charlie Sweet, Eastern Kentucky University
Hal Blythe, Eastern Kentucky University

Abstract

In the 1770's before Daniel Boone finally settled at Boonesborough, he made many forays into "Cantucke," mentally mapping the territory, taking what game he could, and establishing relationships with the Shawnee and settlers. He started with a curiosity about a land he knew little of and ended up becoming its most famous inhabitant.

In the 1970's in Richmond, about ten miles from Boone's fort, we sat down in a booth at a local McDonald's and started writing--short stories, plays, novels, magazine columns, newspaper articles, and academic papers. One of us was a native Kentuckian and the other a carpetbagging Connecticut Yankee.

In three decades of publications, we set our stories in Miami, New England, the West Coast, and occasionally Kentucky. Our characters likewise came from all parts of the country. Looking back, we find that maybe Frost was right in "The Gift Outright": "The land was ours before we were the land's." That is, in our fiction we were writing about Kentucky much more than we realized.