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| Category: Fiction:Historical |
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| About the Book | |
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In what year did Frank and Co. start a stagecoach mail route between Keokuk and Muscatine? Have you heard of the Graybeards? Were River Pirates ever in Muscatine County? Is there a ghost who walks Wildcat Den State Park? There is an old publisher’s idiom that says, “If the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That is because facts tend to be impersonal, dull, cold and lackluster. Those things don’t make for good reading. Legends on the other hand, tend to bring out the imagination in us. They take us to a place of stimulation and excitement. Legends make us want to believe they are true–fact or not. Legends tend to have just enough fact to be plausible but just enough legend to be…inspired. Not all legends are true; we wouldn’t want them to be because that would take away the element of assumption. Legends are like that rousing children’s game we all used to play–telephone. The message would start off with substance and clarity but as it got passed along, it became distorted and fuzzy. By the time it got to the end, it was just a shell of its former self. Legends have been around since the beginning of our great nation. If Washington had in fact slept everywhere he is purported to have slept, he wouldn’t have accomplished anything. The biggest purveyor of legends has to have been the dime store novelist. They started with facts about Billy the Kid and Wild Bill Hickok but by the time they were finished, they had created some of the great legends of today. These stories are just that. Legend…just enough fact to be possible but just enough speculation to allow us to wonder if what is there is the real story. The only thing that makes these legends true is they are, in fact, incredible and they all happened in Muscatine County.
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| About the Author | |
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Jeff is a Muscatine, Iowa native who has enjoyed writing since his high school years. An avid storyteller, Jeff likes to use his experiences and his vivid imagination to bring his stories to life. |