THE BUCKSTONES

Well, steamin' corapone, this air a right purty story. So it is, so it is. The background theme is the outmoded laws leading to debtors' prison out there in Turkeytoe, Tennessee back 'bout 1833. Seems this Colonel Bion B. Buckstone has got himself imprisoned, that is tossed in the pokey, for not being able to meet his obligations in town. They ain't nobody believes Bion Buckstone is a real colonel, though he sure does run on about how he helped Andy Jackson win the Battle of N-Yawlians. Well, when he took his enforced retirement from business, his seventeen-year-old daughter Prudence, purty as a new red slipper, took off on this epic pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. to see President Jackson, and that's what this here book's about. All that low highway scum she met on the way and how that poor ragged darling finally showed up on the Senate floor as Exhibit A of the injustices of the debtors' law while Senator Thomas Hart Benton orated and thundered for reform. Right twists your heart, this tale. That is, it is a real piece of colorful writing and an entertainment and that's just what it's meant to be.