Following is another of Tom Fiske’s interesting articles:
This afternoon I was writing to a Kentucky author named Keven McQueen. I had just read an excellent book he wrote and was telling him what I thought. In my email I happened to mention a man, Temple Bodley, who wrote a several-volume history of Kentucky. His widow lived up the street from me and she had a son who was interested in electronics when I was about 11 years old. I got to know him and his mother, the widow of the historian. Her dad took her all over the world when she was a kid, so she told me wonderful stories of England and Egypt and other places. I spent a lot of time with them and I also spent many hours in their attic.
Today I looked up the historian on the Internet and found he had written many other books. Then I saw a book in which there was an essay about papers found in a trunk in his old attic. There were 47 original, unknown letters from Gen. Wm Clark to his brother, Jonathan in that trunk. This is the Clark of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. It seems the historian was a great-great grandson of Jonathon Clark. (I am a descendant of Jonathan and William’s aunt Lucinda Clark. So I guess we were cousins of a long distance sort.)
All those years in that attic I spent working on one project or another, and in one of the trunks a few inches from my grubby fingers lay those letters! It was a good thing I did not know about them. When the letters were discovered in 1988, the family gave them to the Filson Club, a Kentucky historical society. Their value was inestimable to historians. I am sure they had great financial value as well.
I am sure that the aura of those letters soaked through the wood slats of the trunk and into my feeble brain, so that I later became an amateur historian. There has to be some reason that I wrote so much about a sergeant on the Expedition and on his son.
Today I wrote to the man in the Filson Club who wrote about finding the letters. Watch this space for future developments.
Who would have thought it? Some of those old trunks are really valuable.