Traces by Patricia L. Hudson

In an Author’s Note at the beginning of this novel, Patricia Hudson writes, “Rebecca, Susannah, and Jemima Boone are among those women whose words have been lost. There’s only a trace [my italics] of them in the tales told about the celebrated explorer, Daniel Boone.” Rebecca was his wife, and Susannah and Rebecca were his two oldest daughters. For twenty-five years, Patricia Hudson, a free-lance journalist and author of non-fiction books, delved deeply into the scant information available about the women of the Boone party, including enslaved women, as well as the women of the Cherokees and the Shawnees who interacted with them directly and indirectly. She talked with historians, biographers, re-enactors, contemporary Cherokees and Shawnees, and retraced the steps of these three women in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri. That is amazing, but what is equally impressive is Patricia Hudson’s command of the language of fiction and her extraordinary ability to bring her characters and