AUTHOR’S NOTE

There are seventeen other completed novels featuring members of the various Sackett generations. Readers interested in learning more about Jubal’s mother and father, Barnabas and Abigail, and his brothers, Kin-Ring, Yance, and Brian, and sister, Noelle, can read Sackett’s Land, To the Far Blue Mountains, and The Warrior’s Path.

Succeeding Sackett generations are developed in these books, listed in more or less chronological order, starting with: Ride the River, which tells the story of Echo Sackett, the youngest female descendant of Kin-Ring, and The Daybreakers and Sackett, which begin the story of Tell, Orrin and Tyrel Sackett, the brothers who follow the trails blazed by their forefathers to help settle the west. Other novels featuring the Sackett brothers and their cousins of the same generation are Lando, Mojave Crossing, The Sackett Brand, The Lonely Men, Treasure Mountain, Mustang Man, Galloway, The Skyliners, The Man From the Broken Hills, Ride the Dark Trail, and Lonely on the Mountain.  In the near future, I’m planning to fill in additional portions of the Sackett family saga, including the story of the Sacketts in the Revolutionary War and Tell Sackett’s early experiences in the Tennessee mountains and his service in the Sixth Cavalry during the Civil War.

Listed below are some additional points of interest about selected people and events written about in Jubal Sackett:

GRASSY COVE: The place where Jubal broke his leg and survived until Keokotah returned for him is a lovely spot. Jubal intended future Sacketts to locate there, only a few miles from the Crab Orchard area where Barnabas met his death.  MAMMOTH, MASTODON, etc.: According to scholars mammoths died out around 6000 B.C. Nonetheless, American Indians record hunting and killing them. One such report occurs in the Bureau of Ethnology report The Ponca Tribe. Returning from their “long hunt” west to the Rockies, the Poncas saw a mammoth, as well as what was probably a giant ground sloth, near what is now Niobrara, Nebraska.  David Thompson, the distinguished Hudson’s Bay Co. explorer, on January 7, 1811, came upon some tracks near the Athabasca River in the northern Rockies which the Indians told him were those of a mammoth. The Indians had assured him the animal was to be found there. Many Indian tribes had accounts of seeing or hunting the mammoth.

Near Moab, at Hys Bottom close to the Colorado River, there is a petroglyph of a mastodon. And in the Four Corners area near Flora Vista a small boy found two slabs on which were carved many glyphs, including pictures of two elephants.  They have been called fakes, which is the most convenient way of getting rid of something that does not fit current beliefs.

PRINCE MADOC: Prince Madoc’s existence is doubted by many (not by me), and much has been written from time to time. Perhaps the best account is Madoc, and the Discovery of America, by Richard Deacon.

ROMAN COINS: Several Roman coins have been found in Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky. Comments on these are made in Judge Haywood’s Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee. This history covers white settlements up to 1768 and was published in 1823. Haywood also comments on burials of bodies with blue eyes and auburn hair, wrapped in hides and left in caves.  TENNESSEE: Ramsey, in his Annals of Tennessee, says: “At the time of its first exploration, Tennessee was a vast and almost unoccupied wilderness—a solitude over which an Indian hunter seldom roamed, and to which no tribe put in a distinct and well-defined claim.”

One hundred years before Daniel Boone, James Needham was sent into Tennessee to explore the possibilities of trade, traveling there in 1673. He had been sent by a trader, Abraham Wood, whose previous expedition in 1671 had provided too little information. With Needham was a young indentured servant, Gabriel Arthur, who was left behind to learn the Cherokee language.