From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: (urth) PEACE: Kate's diary
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2002 03:43:26 -0600

mantis wrote:
>That is not the verbatim of the diary text.  If you prefer, it is the image
>of the "story behind the veiled text" that Weer imagines as Kate reads it,
>but I think it is too close in style to the intrusions of Ghost Kate
>interacting with Hannah at the end of the banshee tale (where Hannah speaks
>in italics) to be anything else but a ghostly "story behind the veiled
>text."

Kate never read from the diary; Lois did. Kate *couldn't* have read from the
diary for some very good reasons, chief of which is the fact that *the diary
didn't exist until Lou Gold wrote it* in the 1950s. Secondly, Kate never
kept a diary. She couldn't have, because she couldn't read or write. As Weer
told Lois, the old Kate was "illiterate, or nearly so". (167)

Lou Gold claimed that Kate Boyne had "attended school in Boston, and a nun
gave it [The Catholic Girl's 7-Year Day Book] to her as some sort of
prize--she tells about it on the first page" (189). If Kate had gone to
school she wouldn't have been "illiterate, or nearly so", and nuns in the
19th century didn't award prizes to girls who were.

>The Boston detail is a difference, especially when Weer is so certain.
>OTOH, when teenager Hannah Mills presumably returned with mother and sister
>to the farm and discovered that bandits had been there, had locked up her
>dad and the hired man and maybe done something unspeakable to beloved Kate,
>well that would understandably put a dampener on the whole trip, perhaps
>even to the point where the trip would not be mentioned by Hannah.

This all presupposes the contents of the forged diary were true. Nothing but
a few biographical facts, gleaned from courthouse records, in the diary were
true--the rest was all the product of Lou Gold's imagination. There was no
trip to Boston. Quantrill never came to the Mill farm; there was no buried
treasure in Sugar Creek, no moonlight tryst.

Ghosts of real people associated with real events is one thing; ghosts of
real people who never met and are associated with imaginary events is
another.

Or are you suggesting that the fictional account Lou Gold authored in the
1950s somehow *changed the course of history in the 1860s*? That just
because Gold wrote it that way in his forgery, that Hannah, who died before
Gold ever even heard of her, who had never in her life "been a hundred miles
off from that little house" she was born in (10), had the facts of her life
changed, posthumously, so that she *did* go to Boston and Quantrill *did*
come to the Mill farm?

If that is the case, then Quantrill *did* bury his gold in Sugar Creek and
Weer just didn't find it. And I'm going to buy a shovel. 

-Roy


--