"WHERE FACTS YIELD THEIR SECRET SENSE" -- ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN: INTRODUCTION

 I hope to publish several chapters per week here from my latest book, Annals of the Dear Unknown: A Verse-Tale.  

Before I publish the first chapter, as well as a list of the characters ("named participants") in the story, I include below my Author's Note, which serves as a general introduction.  

After all twenty-seven poems have been reprinted here, I will, of course, add maps, a selected bibliography, acknowledgments, and several reviews.

I spent the better part of the COVID-19 pandemic years researching and writing Annals of the Dear Unknown. The book is dedicated to Rachel Tyler Munson (1736 - 1778), my fifth great-grandmother.

 

Author’s Note

 

Rose’s people came from Connecticut.

 

            That vague description of my great-grandmother, Rose Munson Chandler, as well as a sepia-toned family portrait of Rose sitting alongside her husband, Benjamin Chandler and their three sons, were all I knew as a child of my Munson family history. Like the protagonist in Thomas Campbell’s poem, Gertrude of Wyoming, I often thought about my own “dear unknown” ancestors who had emigrated from Europe to Connecticut, and from there to Pennsylvania.

            It wasn’t until the death of my father several years ago, when I came across and took possession of an old tome titled The Munson Record, that the Munson ancestry came alive for me. In tracing my lineage, generation through generation, back to Captain Thomas Munson who, along with other Pilgrims, sailed to America in 1634, I read the story of Rose’s great-great-grandfather, Obadiah Munson, his wife Rachel Tyler Munson, and their twelve children.

            I discovered that I was a descendant of one of those children, Walter Munson, who, with his older brother, Wilmot and other siblings, was part of a frantic evacuation from the town of Westmoreland at the time of the Battle of Wyoming in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania.

            During this exodus, known as the Great Runaway, over two thousand frontier settlers were forced to abandon their farms, taking narrow Indian paths and rudimentary roads over mountains and through dense forest areas known as The Great Swamp and The Shades of Death as they made their way to safety hundreds of miles away. Others escaped in canoes and rafts, desperately paddling and poling downstream on the Susquehanna to Fort Augusta and beyond.

            The history of Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania in the years prior to and during the Yankee-Pennamite Wars and the American Revolution is complex on many levels. It is not the purpose of this collection to re-litigate the legal question and cultural notion concerning the proprietary right of soil. It will not question the wisdom—or lack thereof—of the military decision made on July 3, 1778, nor will it dwell on or dispute conflicting, exaggerated, and subsequently debunked accounts of its aftermath.

            Rather, Annals of the Dear Unknown is simply an honest and plainly told tale, written by someone who, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, History, has hoped to “attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike.”

 

                                                                                                                                                                       

—Catherine Chandler

 

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