Wilderness plots

Fifty short tales trace the settlement of the Ohio Valley between roughly 1780 and 1850. The collection opens with La Salle sighting the Ohio River and closes as the Civil War approaches, at a time when this country was the frontier and a place of new opportunity.

The stories are told in the spare, compressed style of folklore, and they give voice to ordinary people who rarely appear in official records. Among them are preachers and profiteers, a boy said to have saved Cleveland, a carpenter whose love goes unrequited, generals, journalists, a hermit, a lawyer, farmers, bone collectors, lovers, and idlers. Each tale packs a whole life into a single paragraph.

The author places these pieces within a long line of American writing. He presents them as a portrait of a settlement process that played out across the entire continent, from New England to California and Alaska. For more than two centuries, before cities and industry took hold, settlers struggled with the land and the people already living on it.

Because that struggle shaped everyone who followed, the encounter with the wilderness remains one of the central themes of American literature.