A careful reading of Ingram’s book reveals how informed he was by this ideal. The opening of An Authenticated Story could have come straight from Turner: “More than one hundred years ago, the Star of Empire took its course westward, following the footprints of the advance guard who had blazed the way with blood, driving the red man, whose savagery rendered life unsafe and civilization impossible, from this country, then, as now, teeming with possibilities.” Northern Tennessee was, by Ingram’s time, settled land, but he cast the Bell homestead as an outpost on America’s wild borderland, where good men and their families brought order and commerce to a place of “savagery.” “The land of milk and honey had been discovered in Tennessee, then the far west,” Ingram writes, “and the flow of emigration from North Carolina, Virginia, and other old states, became steady and constant, rapidly settling up the country.” Andrew Jackson’s appearance in the legend, as a war hero–turned–amateur ghost hunter, would seem to further cement Ingram’s debt to Turner.
John Bell, like the other settlers of Red River, is held up by Ingram as a perfect representative of Turner’s frontier Americanism. Of the town’s founders, he writes that they “raised large families, and formed the aristocratic society of the country, and no man whose character for morality and integrity was not above reproach was admitted to the circle. The circle, however, widened, extending up and down the river, and into Kentucky, embracing a large area of territory. Open hospitality characterized the community, and neighbors assisted each other and co-operated in every good move for the advancement of education and Christianity.” The John Bell of Ingram’s book is the archetypal American, a figure who gets ahead through industrious hard work, builds a homestead and a family on the edge of civilization, domesticates the land, and raises a successful family.
And yet, somehow everything goes wrong; Bell watches helplessly and haplessly as his family is plagued by unseen forces and slowly torn apart—a frontier American Job. An Authenticated History is, if nothing else, the story of American masculinity in crisis. John Bell cannot protect his daughter, and he cannot protect himself. A female spirit—ghost or witch or otherwise—torments him and imperils his daughter, while, in a final emasculating gesture, being perpetually kind and complimentary to his wife.