Seeking location of the Journal of William Grills [circa 1740-died
1785], published in Baltimore, MD., in 1808.  It was researched by
Allan W. Eckert in the 1950s and referenced in the 1967 publication of
THE FRONTIERSMEN.  A couple of decades later, when I was following up
on his sources, I found every source but that one.  Eckert can't
recall, after so long a time and after so many, many documents were
researched, exactly where he found this particular journal.  Other
records indicate Grills was from Virginia or Md., although he was
killed by Indians in Kentucky and appears in records there.  He had
formerly been a captive of the
Indians and was afterwards a trapper, hunter, and guide.

Whew! What a search!  And for naught it seems. 

Sorry Historyscout, but I have nothing for you, except a list of
places your Grills Journal is NOT, which I’ll leave here as a comment
in case another intrepid researcher wants to take a shot at it.

First, here’s a nice excerpt of the Allan Eckert story you refer to:

 [The following is from The Frontiersman by Allan W. Eckert ((c)
1967), an
authentic scholarly non-fiction novel on how the whites took Kentucky
and the
Ohio Valley from native American tribes at the close of the 1700s. In
his
Author's Note, Eckert wrote: "This book is fact, not fiction. Certain
techniques normally associated with the novel were used, but in no
case was
this at the expense of historical accuracy. In no case was there any
'whole
cloth' fabrication or fanciful fictionalization. Every incident
described
actually occurred; every date is historically accurate; and every
character,
regardless how major or minor, actually lived the role portrayed."]


Saturday, April 30, 1774
It was customary, when canoes bearing whites met on the Ohio, to put
ashore
and pass along whatever news each might have about the direction from
which
they had come. Rarely, however, did both parties have news as
momentous as
when the single large canoe bearing Jacob Greathouse, Bill Grills and
John
and Rafe Mahon encountered the six canoes of the Michael Cresap party
near
the mouth of Little Beaver Creek.
http://www.chieflogan.org/chiefhistory/chiefhistory.html


Ok, now a list of all the places I’ve checked --

Library of Congress

All University and College Library Databases in Washington DC:

(American University, Washington DC University, Catholic University of
America, Gallaudet University, George Mason University, George
Washington University, Marymount University, and the University of the
District of Columbia.)

All University and College Library Databases in Maryland: 

(All campuses of Univ of Maryland, Bowie State University, Coppin
State College,  Frostburg State University, Salsbury University,
Towson University, University of Baltimore, UMBC )

The University of Kentucky Library Database

Maryland State Archives
http://search2.mdarchives.state.md.us/

My thought is that this journal has either ended up in a private
collection, in which case you might post a message here:

Grills family Geneology Forum
http://genforum.genealogy.com/grills/

Or perhaps it was not published in actual book form at all but was
instead published in a magazine or newspaper in which case it might be
available on microfilm here:

Maryland State Archives: Guide to Maryland Newspapers Featuring the
Newspapers Collections.

http://www.mdarchives.state.md.us/msa/speccol/news/dates/html/1801.html

Sorry I couldn’t help you out. Maybe my colleague who is also working
on your second request for this information will have better luck.

Regards, K~

Someone with access (not me) should check in the Worldcat database

I tried WorldCat via my library's online databases, but found nothing
on "William Grills" or "Bill Grills".

huntsman

.
You know, while I was searching for this, a thought kept bothering
me... was this journal a convenient "invention" of the author?  Since
all the other books were real, who would doubt that last source if
they couldn't find it?

Now, I'm not accusing Eckert of anything - merely commenting on
thoughts that crossed my mind.

So I decided to approach this search for the journal from that angle
of mine - that it never existed - and see what popped up.

You might find this interesting...

FOLLOWING MATERIAL QUOTED FROM WEB SITE:

I have been apprised that your organization has published THE
FROINTERSMAN, a book by Alan W. Eckert.  That book was previously
published by Little, Brown, Boston, in 1967.

Hailed as the true story of the conquest of Ohio country in the late
18th Century, Eckert’s narrative turned out to be one of his own
making rather than factual history of its main personage,
Waweypiesenwa, the last principal War Chief of the Shawnee Tribe.  In
this book, Eckert demands that Waweypiesenwa was a captive white man
with no Indian blood, rather than the Shawnee Indian that he was. 
Gathering the literary world at his feet over the highly monetarily
successful THE FRONTIERSMAN, Eckert parlayed his Blue Jacket (the name
the British used to address Waweypiesenwa) character, , into a series
of four books.  The other three are: Blue Jacket, War Chief of the
Shawnees, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1969; A Sorrow in Our
Heart, Bantam Books, New York, 1992; and The Dark and Bloody River,
Bantam Books, New York, 1995.

Each of the four books utilized the same un-truthful material about
Blue Jacket, even though the real facts about this great man came
glaringly to light during this same time period, due to fastidious
research of reliable historians and genealogists.

=====

.
Ack... hit the wrong scroll bar and it posted itself...

This continues my previous post.

The web site for that quoted material is this: 
http://www.shawnee-tribe.org/P&P/P&P_Page2.htm

I'll continue digging and see what I can come up with by following
this particular assumption...

TexasT
.

.
What I'm getting at by quoting that web site is this: if Eckert lied
about Blue Jacket and Van Swearingen in this particular book, there's
a better chance that he did the same in "The Frontiersman".

That web site states the following further down:

"Although Blue Jacket inaccuracies penned by Eckert are rife in his
work, the absolute worst is his statement that Blue Jacket killed his
own brother in the Battle of St. Clair’s Defeat, pitting the U. S.
Army and the Kentucky Milita against a consortium of Algonquian Tribes
on November 4, 1791 at the Wabash River where Fort Recovery, Ohio now
stands.  A Captain Van Swearingen of the U. S. Army gave his life to
his country in that battle as did some 600 others on the side of the
whites.  Eckert knew of that fact and used it to concoct a lie more
palatable to his pocketbook and his readers voracious need for
Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story
type events (They both used the white man story championed by Eckert).

"It is a travesty, this thing that Eckert used to trash Captian
Swearingen and his true place in real history.  The Swearingen family
has been deprived of its rightful heritage since 1967 by Eckert,
fought tooth and nail to preserve its true culture and here you are,
trying to tell the world that you are depicting true history with your
new publication."

=====

I'll continue to pursue this angle and let you know what I find out.

TexasT
.

.
Well, so far I've found nothing. Eckert seems to be squeeky clean,
except for that one site I mentioned earlier.  The concensus of
opinion seems to be that he does excellent research work for his
historical novels.

So the dissenting opinion given in that web site that I found really
sticks out now.  Makes me wonder what exactly is going on here.

It might be interesting to write the guy and see what research and/or
historian accounts he's basing his comments on.  He's pretty harsh in
what he says about Eckert...

I'll continue this search periodically as I have time and see what
else I stumble across - I love mysteries, and this has become one!

TexasT
.

You're going off on a wild goose chase if you are telling me that
Allan Eckert made the Journal of William Grills up.

This is Historyscout, and I'm putting up the reward for an answer. 
I'm a researcher myself, and have been Allan W. Eckert's chief
critic--at least, of those critics who are sane and approach history
without a political agenda.

    Some of the people you quote above are use racist arguments
against the book, claiming no white man could become a Shawnee chief
(something easily disproved), and trying to obtain benefits from
Congress because of alleged lies in this regard.  All of which is
silly.  See my site at http://hometown.aol.com/fa11leaf/

Eckert never made anything up, and what he was wrong about came from
historical sources available in the 1950s and my arguments with
Eckert's conclusions are really arguments against the sources he used.
 Now William Grills is a special case.  He was a real man and I found
records on him which Eckert could not possibly have seen which shore
up what Eckert wrote about him.  But I have not found the journal
itself, hence my reward for it.

.
Historyscout,

Yeah, you're right about it being a wild goose chase - so far I
haven't been able to turn up anything else along those lines.  I'd
still be curious to know what sources that guy used as the basis for
his scathing comments about Eckert.

From what I've been able to find so far, Eckert has a pretty solid
reputation as a researcher for the background to his stories, and the
thought had already struck me that (if anything) maybe his sources
were faulty and the guy at the web site I quoted is really going after
the wrong person.

My apologies for that rather premature posting of my findings.  I
should have held off and not jumped the gun like that.  I would have
still posted it, but I would have (should have) handled it
differently.

TexasT
.

Allan Eckert has won numerous awards, been nominated for the Pulitzer
Prize eight times, and his 39 books are an enormous contribution to
American literature.  Despite my often biased and unfair criticism of
him, he has been gentlemenly and has assisted me in every way.  No one
would be happier than Mr. Eckert should someone here come up with the
location of this journal I seek.

My thought is, that the copy Eckert saw is now in a private library,
and the manuscript now in an arcane library collection, awaiting
rediscovery.  In the 1950s, libraries were unprotected and many were
pilfered, as detailed in Nicholas Basbanes's A FINE MADNESS and Miles
Harvey's THE ISLAND OF LOST MAPS.  But perhaps someone here knows of a
manuscript database or a search engine that had not occurred to me.  I
posted the question at the Grills genealogy forum, by the way, at the
same time I posted it here.

I THINK I've read all the comments here so if this is redundant, my
pardon. Just wanted to add a source I checked to no avail that I
haven't seen anyone else mention yet (in order to save them grief):
The National Union Catalog Pre-1956 imprints. I also checked several
indexes to historic 19th century journals to no avail. Ol' Bill Grills
is one tough hombre to track down!

fugitive-ga

From the Library of Congress:

We have searched the Library of Congress catalog, as well as online
catalogs of major institutions, FirstSearch, and the index to the
published bibliography, American Diaries: Diaries Written from 1492 to
1844 (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company, 1983), but find no
person listed named William Grills. They may be able to help you at
the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St., Baltimore, MD
21201-4484. Another suggestion is that you contact the Maryland
Historical Society, 201 W. Monument St., Baltimore, MD 21201.

VW, Reference Librarian, Library of Congress

It seems that the only person we know of who found the journal was
Eckert.  I would suggest retracing Eckert's steps.  I realize that
that is not entirely possible, but Eckert must have visited some
finite number of libraries, and I think that they would be a good
place to start.  For example, where did Eckert live while he was
writing The Frontiersman? Unless Eckert did very extensive research
I'd bet that the journal is within 300 miles of where he lived.

I'm not sure why, but the search for your missing journal has rather
captivated me.  In my spare moments, I fire off emails to reference
librarians, and scour obscure corners of the Internet in search of the
long lost Bill Grills.

One search led me to the Maryland State Archives at:

http://www.mdarchives.state.md.us/megafile/msa/speccol/sc2900/sc2908/html/index.html

Archives of Maryland Online 

Among their collections, they have a history of pretty much everything
published in the state in the early days:

Volume 440 - Maryland Imprints, 1801-1810 by Roger P. Bristol. 
Volume 439 - History of Printing in Maryland, 1791-1800 with a
Bibliography of Works Printed in the State During the Period by Rachel
A. Minick.
Volume 438 - The Maryland Press, 1777-1790 by Joseph Towne Wheeler. 

These are very extensive lists of all the Maryland publishing houses
of the day, along with everything they published.  There's no mention
of "The Journal of William Grills".

Perhaps you could speculate on a couple of questions that would help
guide any future searches:

1.  Do you think the Journal was published as a book (of which perhaps
there are multiple existing copies), or was it only an original
manuscript with only one copy in existence?  If the latter, why would
Eckert cite it as "published"?

2.  Why was Eckert's reference to the book so obscure?  For instance,
there's no mention of who the publisher was, or where the book was
physically located?

3.  Are you sure it was published in Baltimore, or was perhaps, the
publisher itself named Baltimore?

4.  Any idea what libraries and other resources Eckert frequented?

Any hints here might help someone zero in on the elusive Journal.  I
look forward to your next post.

In answer to the comment above:

Eckert's citation in THE FRONTIERSMEN is:

Grills, William, [itallics <I>] Journal of William Grills </I>,
Baltimore, 1808), pp. 107-113, 135-138, 180-183, 191-209.

Eckert subsequently published many works devoted to research in
obscure documents, and he did indeed travel widely and research
deeply.  His works were the first to utitilize Draper's Manuscripts in
a popular historical narrative and indeed he inspired professionals
and students alike, created such a demand that now the 386 or so
volumes of them can now be found in almost any major metropolitian or
university library.

Historical research was at a low ebb back when Eckert was writing THE
FRONTIERSMAN, and it was rare that any popular history even included
its sources, much less give the detail provided by Eckert.  No one
questioned his sources much until decades later, by that time he had
traveled widely and researched many other books.  He was living in
Everglades, Florida around 1980 when I first called him to ask the
location of this particular source.  He said then that he wasn't
certain, but he was thinking that he found it in Draper's Papers.  But
I have been through Draper's Papers and did not find it--but the
papers are vast and it is easy to miss things.  Draper included many
obscure journals and arcane self-published works, but I did not find
this one, nor does it appear in the since published reader guides and
general indexes.

In INDIAN BLOOD, volume I, I wrote about this, and about my
frustration at not being able to find it.  In the second volume of my
series, while acknowledging the great inspirational and historical
value of his works, I openly critiqued Eckert for his lapses.  Since
then, I've found where Eckert was right all along on a number of
issues, and I've had to apologize.

Eckert is much older than he looks, but still runs on full power, and
we have often discussed the journal.  One day he contacted me one day,
said he found a reference to the location of the journal in an old
note, but after a bit of gleeful tracking to a New England library, I
came up empty again.

Another researcher who is preparing a documentary for PBS recently got
in touch with Eckert in an effort to locate this old journal, and
Eckert told him what he could and referred him to me.  Hence my taking
up the hunt again.

Eckert has retired from frontier research (as much as any of us can
retire), but I sent a link to Allan Eckert immediately after posting
the question here, and he may be monitoring this off and on as I know
he is interested.  You may E-mail him at allaneck@bright.net but I
doubt if he can tell you anything other than what I've stated here. 
But I'm trying to keep an open mind on all avenues of research.