The Knights of the Horseshoe: A Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion is a highly fictionalized, romanticized account of Alexander Spotswood's quest to cross the Blue Ridge. According to some sources, it was first published in 1882, while others state that it was written in the 1840s or 1850s. Both statements may be true (i.e. it was first published several years after it was written).

Historic Context

Beyond the romantic excesses of much of the story, there is an important, politically charged undercurrent that makes The Knights of the Horseshoe a significant historic document for its own time. The novel was written around the time of the Mexican-American wars and American expansion westward. It plays to public sentiments of the time, taking as its basis the inevitability and "correctness" of American, or specifically, Anglo-Saxon, dominence over the American continent. There is no hint of malice, or at least any question of the necessity, in Spotswood's motivations for crossing the mountains and establishing English settlement further to the West. It is simply assumed that such expansion is the Englishman's right and that, in doing so, he is furthering the spread of the only proper civilization on Earth. Additionally, anyone else with claim to the land is presented as the "other," and their claim to it is not given any consideration. The climatic battle scene between Spotswood's Rangers and the Native Americans isn't even really about territory per se; it is about protection of a white woman. The implicit threat of the "other" is made quite clear. In this regard, the book doubles as a propaganda piece, as informed by the political needs of its writer and those whose opinions he represented as by the history it purports to recount.

Summary

The Knights of the Horseshoe: A Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion is a highly fictionalized, romanticized account of Alexander Spotswood's quest to cross the Blue Ridge. According to some sources, it was first published in 1882, while others state that it was written in the 1840s or 1850s. Both statements may be true (i.e. it was first published several years after it was written).

The novel opens by introducing Spotswood and his family and several of their associates in the setting of Spotswood's plantation on the Chesapeake, Temple Farm. The cast includes Governor Spotswood, his wife, Lady Spotswood, and his four children, John, Catherine Anne (Kate), Dorothea and Robert, as well as Kate's suitors Bernard Moore and Kit Carter, the Rev. Commissary Blair, head of the College of William and Mary, and Dr. Evylin, "the most celebrated physician of his day in the colony, and the bosom friend of his excellency." To this group are soon added Dr. Evylin's daughter, Ellen, and Henry Hall, a mysterious young man recently arrived from Scotland who applies to be Robert Spotswood's private tutor.

Ellen Evylin comes to Temple Farm at the encouragement of Kate Spotswood because she is despondent over the presumed death of her fiance, Francis Lee, in Scotland where he had gone to study, and because of the unwanted attention of his brother, Harry Lee. She strikes up a friendship with the new tutor, Henry Hall, who is a cousin of Lee and possesses a letter written by Francis Lee to Ellen Evylin. She takes the letter as evidence that her lover is dead, although Hall allows that Lee may yet live.

Meanwhile, John Spotswood has been moody and given to night terrors brought on by alcohol abuse. His friend, Brenard Moore, tries to find out what his trouble is, but is merely saddened by Spotswood's drinking. The reader discovers that Spotswood's depression is due to his affair with a young Indian woman, Wingina, who is pregnant with his child.

Harry Lee, meanwhile, produces a letter to prove that the man posing as Henry Hall, the tutor, is an impostor, and that the real Henry Hall is en route to the colony from Scotland. The tutor is imprisoned, and when bail is posted, he sets out for Germanna, where he has acquaintances from Scotland. He stops for the night at a frontier outpost, where coincidentally Harry Lee and John Spotswood (with Wingina disguised as his servant) also stop to spend the night. In the night Spotswood is murdered as he sleeps in the same room as Lee and Hall (who has not been recognized by his fellow travelers) and Lee, upon discovering that Hall slept next to Spotswood, suspects that he has commited the act, mistaking Spotswood for Lee. Hall is again arrested and imprisoned in Williamsburg. Few notice that Spotswood's "servant" also disappeared at the same time as his murder.

While these events are transpiring, Governor Spotswood learns that all of the Native American students at the College of William and Mary have escaped (they were more or less imprisoned at the college in an attempt to reeducate and "civilize" them that seems misguided to modern sensibilities) and that all of the settlers at Germanna have been slaughtered save one, a lovely young Scottish lady who has presumably been captured to take the place of the now impure Wingina as a chief's wife. Wingina, however, manages to escape her captors and return to Williamsburg during Hall's trial, just in time to offer the testimony that would absolve him of responsibilty for John Spotswood's murder. She reveals that her brother, the chief Chunoluskee, murdered Spotswood and captured her on his way to Germanna with the other recently escaped students.

Overarching all of these dramatic storylines, Governor Spotswood has been trying to win approval from the House of Burgesses to organize an expedition to cross the Blue Ridge. He finally wins that approval and organizes a meeting to establish which young men of the gentry will accompany him. This meeting takes place shortly after the conclusion of Hall's trial, and Harry Lee intends to use the meeting as a forum at which to produce the real Henry Hall and out the tutor once and for all as an impostor, thereby discrediting the tutor, who is in the Governor's favor as a top candidate for inclusion in the "Tramontane Order." When the real Hall arrives, however, he and the imposter embrace and reveal to all present that the imposter is really Francis Lee, disguised by a mustache and a wig, using Hall's identity with Hall's blessing to safeguard his life in his escape from Scotland. Francis Lee, now the subject of great jubilation, leaves this meeting to reveal his true identity to his former sweetheart, Ellen Evylin. They renew their betrothal.

Shortly, the Governor and his attendent Rangers and adventurers depart on their expedition, making their first stop a brief, slightly disdainful assessment of the death and destruction at Germanna, followed by a hearty round of drinks to help them forget it. Throughout their trip, they are dogged by unseen Indian attackers, who occasionally kill one or two men who have been posted as sentries. The climatic battle scene arrives, naturally, at the same time as the expedition's arrival at the mountains, and the Indians, whose primary tactic consists of rolling large stones in the direction of their foes, are outwitted and driven back, although the young captive woman is not rescued until later when the real Henry Hall, who as it turns out was her suitor in Scotland, makes a daring and romantic rescue while simultaneously burning down the village of her captors. Thus victorious and not a little battle weary, the party heads back toward Williamsburg.

The narrative ends with the triple wedding of Kate Spotswood and Bernard Moore, Francis Lee and Ellen Evylin, and Henry Hall and Eugenia, the lovely young captive. Westward expansion over the Blue Ridge is soon to begin, those pesky Indians have been run out, all the other motley bad guys have disappeared, the fates of John Spotswood's illegitamate child and its mother are completely ignored, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Myth versus Reality

Spotswood is presented as an older man, married with four children ranging in age from adolescence to adulthood. In fact, in the period 1714-1716 (the book gives the date as 1714, although the real trip took place in 1716), Spotswood was in his thirties, unmarried and childless. The names and respective ages of the characters in the book do match up with those of Spotswood's eventual children, and some of their personal histories are accurately, if anachronistically, depicted; for example, Spotswood's elder daughter, Ann Catherine, did marry Bernard Moore, as does her character in the book. On the other hand, many other of the events involving Spotswood's children in the book are not true to life; namely, his elder son, John, was not brutally murdered by the brother of the Native American mother of his illegitimate child. Much, if not all, of the storylines having to do with Native American characters can be regarded as complete fiction.

Other fictitious storylines that use Native Americans as handy all-around bad guys include the massacre at and destruction of Germanna and the battle during the expedition to cross the Blue Ridge. None of the members of the expedition were killed, although a few did leave early on due to illness. One facet of the story that has been glossed over rather than amplified, is that of the reportedly copious alcohol consumption during the transmontane expedition; perhaps as part of the depiction of these men in a "Great White Men," morally superior vein.