The Ohio Frontier

Recounts the arrival in Ohio of Iroquois-speaking Indians, the entry of white fur traders and missionaries, the slaughter and expulsion of the Indians, and settlement by New Englanders and others.

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.

In 1826 thirty-year-old Anna Briggs Bentley, her husband, and their six children left their close Quaker community and the worn-out tobacco farms of Sandy Spring, Maryland, for frontier Ohio. Along the way, Anna sent back home the first of scores of letters she wrote her mother and sisters over the next fifty years as she strove to keep herself and her children in their memories. With Anna's natural talent for storytelling and her unique, female perspective, the letters provide a sustained and vivid account of everyday domestic life on the Ohio frontier. She writes of carving a farm out of the forest, bearing many children, darning and patching the family clothes, standing her ground in religious controversy, nursing wounds and fevers, and burying beloved family and friends. Emily Foster presents these revealing letters of a pioneer woman in a framework of insightful commentary and historical context, with genealogical appendices.

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.

A woman is kidnapped from Fort Henry by a band of renegades and hostile Ohio Valley Indians. Now, Lewis Wetzel and Jonathan Zane take pursuit. With no hope of survival, they follow the trail into the unknown wilderness, vowing it to be their last venture. At trail's end, they will face their bloodiest battle. The Last Trail is the second book in Zane Grey's Frontier trilogy. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.