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"Frontier and pioneer life -- United States -- History -- Sources"
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Seasons of Misery
The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment.Seasons of Miseryoffers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable early days, placing crisis-both experiential and existential-at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events.Seasons of Miseryaddresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity.
eBook
Voices of the Buffalo Soldier : records, reports, and recollections of military life and service in the West
\"This collection of [nearly 60] documents illuminates the lives and experiences of the African Americans who served in the Regular Army between the Civil War and World War I and fought in some of the most difficult wars against western Indians.\"--Hardcover book jacket.
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Bluecoat and pioneer : the recollections of John Benton Hart, 1864-1868
\"An annotated collection of the memoirs of frontiersman John Benton Hart, a young Kansas cavalryman who served in the Missouri border conflicts during the late Civil War and who witnessed pivotal events in the post-Civil War opening of the West and the displacement of native peoples in the future states of Wyoming and Montana.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Writing the Trail
For a long time, the American West was mainly identified with white masculinity, but as more women’s narratives of westward expansion came to light, scholars revised purely patriarchal interpretations. Writing the Trail continues in this vein by providing a comparative literary analysis of five frontier narratives---Susan Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, Sarah Royce’s A Frontier Lady, Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters, Eliza Farnham’s California, In-doors and Out, and Lydia Spencer Lane’s I Married a Soldier---to explore the ways in which women’s responses to the western environment differed from men’s.Throughout their very different journeys---from an eighteen-year-old bride and self-styled “wandering princess\" on the Santa Fe Trail, to the mining camps of northern California, to garrison life in the Southwest---these women moved out of their traditional positions as objects of masculine culture. Initially disoriented, they soon began the complex process of assimilating to a new environment, changing views of power and authority, and making homes in wilderness conditions.Because critics tend to consider nineteenth-century women’s writings as confirmations of home and stability, they overlook aspects of women’s textualizations of themselves that are dynamic and contingent on movement through space. As the narratives in Writing the Trail illustrate, women’s frontier writings depict geographical, spiritual, and psychological movement. By tracing the journeys of Magoffin, Royce, Clappe, Farnham, and Lane, readers are exposed to the subversive strength of travel writing and come to a new understanding of gender roles on the nineteenth-century frontier.
eBook
The Ohio Frontier
Few mementoes remain of what Ohio was like before white people transformed it. The readings in this anthology -- the diaries of a trader and a missionary, the letter of a frontier housewife, the travel account of a wide-eyed young English tourist, the memoir of an escaped slave, and many others -- are eyewitness accounts of the Ohio frontier. They tell what people felt and thought about coming to the very fringes of white civilization -- and what the people thought and did who saw them coming.
Each succeeding group of newcomers -- hunters, squatters, traders, land speculators, farmers, missionaries, fresh European immigrants -- established a sense of place and community in the wilderness. Their writings tell of war, death, loneliness, and deprivation, as well as courage, ambition, success, and fun. We can see the lust for the land, the struggle for control of it, the terrors and challenges of the forest, and the determination of white settlers to change the land, tame it, \"improve\" it.
The new Ohio these settlers created had no room for its native inhabitants. Their dispossession is a defining theme of the book. As the forests receded and the farms expanded, the Indians were pressured to move out. By the time the last tribe, the Wyandots, left in 1843, they were regarded as relics of the romantic past, and the frontier experience came to a close.
Anyone fascinated by the panorama of America's westward migration will respond to the dramatic stories told in these pages.
eBook
The Peopling of New Connecticut
In 1784 Connecticut laid claim to a territory stretching from Pennsylvania’s western border 120 miles along Lake Erie. In 1786 Congress took steps to legitimate this claim, and explicitly recognized it in 1800. The Peopling of New Connecticut presents primary documents that define Connecticut’s complex relationship with this territory, known then as the Western Reserve. Using excerpts from previously published official records, diaries, newspapers, periodical journals, pamphlets, and the occasional book that illustrates the process whereby Connecticut transplanted some of its people to a distant, western land, this Acorn Club publication illuminates not only the experience of the emigrants as they journeyed to Ohio and settled in the Western Reserve but also the effect that the emigrants’ departure had on the society they left behind. The volume comes with an introduction and commentary about the significance of these republished materials. The Peopling of New Connecticut is a vital, enlightening record of this special chapter in Connecticut’s history and provides unique insight into the early westward movement after the Revolutionary War.
eBook