In 1780, during the Revolutionary War, Kentucky was invaded by 200 British and Canadian soldiers and 800 Native American warriors. They surrounded and compelled to surrender two small American settlements called Ruddell's Fort and Martin's Station. The people there were simply farmers with families. At Ruddell's Fort British Captain Henry Bird promised that settlers would be protected from the Indians and remain in the custody of the English. As soon as the gates opened in surrender, the Indians rushed in, killing some settlers and brutally seizing the rest as slaves, adoptees and prisoners. Every man, woman and child was claimed.All of the families from Ruddell's Fort and Martin's Station, amounting to about 400 people, were kidnapped by the British and Indians and forced on a 500-mile death march to the British stronghold at Fort Detroit. Short on food and driven at a relentless pace, the prisoners endured a reign of terror the entire journey. Family members were separated, not knowing what became of each other. Young and old who slowed the column were killed. Babies were thrown into the fire and to the wayside. Women drowned and were tomahawked. Shocked and dazed by the experience, the American settlers were held as prisoners of war for two and a half years. They were finally welcomed home by General George Washington at army headquarters in Newburgh, New York.This true story is told through the experience of the Mahan family, which traveled the Wilderness Road from Virginia to Martin's Station in an optimistic search for a new life. Instead they found death and imprisonment. All known names of the captives are listed in the book.

David Calvin Bledsoe was a poor man who in the best of times never owned land and could barely support a family. When his nation called for volunteers he risked his own death to preserve the union of the United States. He returned home without a scar. No musket ball or shell fragment ever found him on the battlefield, but in the course of his military service his health was shattered. He afterward lived a ruined physical life and a disastrous financial one. He and his wife were dependent upon the charity of family and friends for their day to day sustenance. The Union veteran pension system - the physicians, politicians, and bureaucrats - did not know how to deal with Bledsoe, and those who were like him. Lincoln's genuine desire to "care for him who shall have borne the battle" was very imperfectly implemented by narrowly focused doctors and administrators. This short book is the story of one Union soldier, David Bledsoe, a veteran who genuinely needed to be cared for. In the final analysis, Lincoln's call was disregarded.

In December 1965, Edgar Harper and his daughter, Mrs. Ella Givens, were kidnapped from the Harper home in Logan County, Kentucky -- their bodies found the following March close to the abandoned Martin Cemetery. In More Than Blood Reveals, the authors explore this murder through the eyes of the fictional Clack sisters, using newspaper reports, FBI case files and interviews to weave a tale of murder and intrigue based on real life events. More Than Blood Reveals presents all the evidence to this murder mystery -- still unsolved after five decades -- and the authors conclude with their thoughts about what really happened on that cold December night.

"An FBI cover-up spanning nearly a century. A victim and his family sworn to secrecy. Machine Gun Kelly's first kidnapping, a crime that changed America before it was swept under the rug of history. Under Penalty of Death: The Untold Story of Machine Gun Kelly's First Kidnapping brings to light for the first time the long-forgotten (and twice covered up) tale of the 1930s kidnapping that saved America from itself. In January 1932, Howard Arthur Woolverton, a wealthy industrialist in South Bend, Indiana, was kidnapped by Kelly and his gang. While no one was killed, the crime-occurring just six weeks before the Lindbergh kidnapping-nevertheless proved a watershed event, gripping the imagination of terrified Americans everywhere. The combined fallout of the two kidnappings helped usher in the federal law that shut down America's professional kidnapping industry for good. However, today Woolverton's name is forgotten, his story erased from public memory as if it had never happened. But why the cover-up? How did Woolverton quash the first investigation? Why did J. Edgar Hoover and his "G-Men" impose their own wall of silence? And how does it all connect with a bloody 1933 FBI screwup at a train station in Kansas City? Drawing on a buried federal statement, family archives, extensive research through period newspaper accounts, and interviews with those few who still remember, Under Penalty of Death: The Untold Story of Machine Gun Kelly's First Kidnapping exposes intrigue and collusion in the era of gangsters, rampant crime, and the Great Depression"--

Presents a historical survey of kidnappings from biblical times to the present.