Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

If you’re any kind of regular reader of my column, you’ll probably recognize the name of Henry Shoemaker. If you read my stuff occasionally, you’ve most likely read the name over two thousand times. Shoemaker was a writer, folklorist, historian, and environmentalist from McElhattan, and it’s safe to say I’m a fan.

I’ve read and researched a lot of Shoemaker’s work. During his prime, he was writing about a book a year, mostly local folklore. He would interview people, talk about their stories of ghosts, buried treasure, curses, magic, and weird monsters, and write these things into a series of books, preserving them for people in the future. Like me. I love this stuff, and I tend to write something every year for his birthday—Shoemaker was born on February 24, 1880.

The thing about Shoemaker, though, is that his work was controversial. Many people think that he made up these stories, instead of interviewing people about them. Practically every time I write about him, I get hate from someone. It’s a weird, unreasoning hate—No matter what I say, or how good a case I make for Shoemaker, I get people who simply ignore anything I’ve actually written and insist that Shoemaker was bad. It’s so ridiculous that some people have blamed Shoemaker for things that happened before he was even born.

For instance, he’s been blamed for making up the Tiadaghton Declaration of Independence. This was a document signed in Pine Creek Township in 1776, a sort of additional Declaration of Independence that’s too small-time for Nicholas Cage to steal. People have accused Shoemaker of making up that story, in spite of the fact that it’s been mentioned in books published at least fifteen years before his birth.

Shoemaker himself always claimed that he wrote down the stories the way they were told to him, and didn’t make them up. (He admitted occasionally creating a fake name or detail to protect people who were still living.) And, you know, I believe that. When you look at the track record, it makes sense that he was telling the truth about this.

I think the whole question of Shoemaker’s veracity can be answered by basically bumping the blame up one generation. When you stop asking if the stories were actual folklore or not, and start asking if Shoemaker was the one to invent them, it becomes clearer.

Look to his sources. In his introductions, he lists many of them: Seth Nelson, Daniel Marks, John Chatham. Many of these guys were old hunting and fishing types, and exactly the type of guys to exaggerate stories. I’m sure none of them ever caught fish that was under four feet long, or shot an animal that wasn’t a perfect specimen.

Seth Nelson, one of Shoemaker’s sources, is a really good example of this. He was what we might politely call a teller of tall tales. Nelson, a panther hunter from the Keating area, was full of stories about how he used to drop his gun and take on panthers and bears in hand-to-hand combat, never losing. He claimed to be immortal and have recovered from blindness through sheer determination. During the Rain of Fire, an 1833 meteor shower, he claimed to have been unharmed after being hit in the head repeatedly with meteors.

Nelson is the most dramatic example, but the rest of these guys were to some extent similar. Looking at the facts, I think Shoemaker was telling the truth: He wrote the stories down the way they were told to him. If the stories were made-up ones instead of folklore, it may have been the guys who told it to him.

And I am sure there’s someone out there right now, reading this, who is sitting down to send me a nasty e-mail.

Have at it. It’s Shoemaker’s birthday, and I figure he deserves a little credit for what he’s done.