Background
The Knights of the Horse-Shoe was not published by the Harper Brothers, who had published Caruthers's earlier novels, but by Charles Yancey of Wetumpka, Alabama, a house that lacked the Harpers' ability to distribute books throughout the United States. There may have been several reasons why Caruthers placed The Knights of the Horse-Shoe with Yancey. The Panic of 1837 had probably forced the Harpers to reduce their list of offerings, and in a tight economy reprints of English favorites seemed safer and more attractive to publishers than the works of American authors. The decision that the Harpers would not publish a third Caruthers novel, then, may have been the publisher's and not the author's. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that by the 1840s southerners had begun to call for a southern literature supported by southern publishers.
Plot
At the same time, Harry Lee and Ellen Evylin arrive at Temple Farm. Lee's brother Frank reportedly has been killed in Scotland and Harry is ready to claim Frank's large estate and, with luck, his relationship with Ellen. A member of the House of Burgesses, Harry Lee has come to help Spotswood gain the votes for his expedition. Ellen, meanwhile, becomes close to the tutor, and conflict between the two suitors ensues. The tutor flees west, stopping at Germanna, a fortified way-station, where he encounters John Spotswood and Wingina, also fleeing. Harry Lee soon arrives, and that night Spotswood is murdered. The tutor is suspected, and Lee has him arrested. During the subsequent trial, Wingina testifies to seeing her brother kill Spotswood, and it is revealed that the tutor is actually Harry's brother Frank. The trial leaves Harry discredited and in debt to his brother, whose estate he has been spending for some time.
Had the novel ended there, with a wedding between Frank and Ellen, it would have followed the pattern Caruthers had established in his earlier novel The Kentuckian in New-York (1833). Such a work might have made for diverting reading, but it would not have made a comment on the western expansion, a subject about which the author had strong feelings. Instead, Caruthers connects the familial relations developed in the the novel to western expansion and Manifest Destiny. Governor Spotswood, accompanied by Frank Lee and a host of other gentlemen, follows a scout named Joe Jarvis to the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. On the way, they learn that the West is a different land, not simply an extension of the East; that is, they shoe their horses, which had not been required in the soft soil of Tidewater Virginia. They must also pursue Native American raiders who have kidnapped Wingina and taken prisoner Eugenia Elliot, the governor's niece, at Germanna.
Historical Content
Critical Reception
Knights of the Horse-Shoe attracted little attention when it was first published. Caruthers's biographer Curtis Carroll Davis writes that "only five press notices of The Knights of the Golden Horse-Shoe have been uncovered, and of those, only one, that in the Southern Quarterly Review, can qualify as a critique." The Review's notice appeared in its April 1846 issue, and declared admiration for the novel's "truth and fidelity, its nice discrimination of character, and its pure and graceful style." It said little else of substance, however, making the reconstruction of how Caruthers's original audience read the work is especially difficult. Similarly, the lack of surviving comments by the author rules out establishing how he hoped that his work would be understood. It fell to Davis to attempt the first detailed discussion of the novel in his biography of Caruthers.
Davis pointed out that the expedition "constituted a skein of events almost ready-cut for custom tailoring by some writer of fiction," and Caruthers, writing the first full-length book ever written about the expedition glamorized the governor and his men. For Davis, the expedition is the force that unifies the subplots revolving around Frank Lee's identity and John Spotswood's indiscretions with Wingina. As he sees it, the courtship plots "make for suspense in their own right"—even though the ordering of events in the plot suggests that Caruthers saw connections between the expedition and the romantic lives of his characters. Harry Lee, the thoroughly dastardly villain, helps to make the work "an archetype of the swords-and-cloaks romance," but Davis struggles with the idea of The Knights of the Horse-Shoe as romance. While he appears to take issue with the commentators who disparage the historical inaccuracies of the work, he is still careful in his own reading to point out the major differences between Caruthers's representation and what the author had found in the sources he is known to have consulted.
References
Further Reading
Cite This Entry
- APA Citation:
Hare, J. L. The Knights of the Horse-Shoe (1845). (2019, May 23). In Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved from http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/Knights_of_the_Horse-Shoe_The_1845.
- MLA Citation:
Hare, John L. "The Knights of the Horse-Shoe (1845)." Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, 23 May. 2019. Web. READ_DATE.
First published: May 3, 2019 | Last modified: May 23, 2019
Contributed by John L. Hare, professor of American Studies and English at Montgomery College.