Through The Howling Wilderness

A great military history about the early days of the American Revolution, Thomas A. Desjardin's Through a Howling Wilderness is also a timeless adventure narrative that tells of heroic acts, men pitted against nature's fury, and a fledgling nation's fight against a tyrannical oppressor. Before Benedict Arnold was branded a traitor, he was one of the colonies' most valuable leaders. In September 1775, eleven hundred soldiers boarded ships in Massachusetts, bound for the Maine wilderness. They had volunteered for a secret mission, under Arnold's command to march and paddle nearly two hundred miles and seize British Quebec. Before they reached the Canadian border, hundreds died, a hurricane destroyed canoes and equipment and many deserted. In the midst of a howling blizzard, the remaining troops attacked Quebec and almost took Canada from the British simultaneously weakening the British hand against Washington. With the enigmatic Benedict Arnold at its center, Desjardin has written one of the great American adventure stories.

Through the Howling Wilderness is replete with in-depth coverage on the geography of the region, the Congressional hearings after the Campaign, and the Confederate defenses in the Red River Valley.

During the 19th century, New Zealand's South Island underwent an environmental transformation at the hands of European settlers. They diverted streams and drained marshes, burned native vegetation and planted hedges and grasses, stocked farms with sheep and cattle and poured on fertilizer. Through various letter books, ledgers, diaries, and journals, this book reveals how the first European settlers learned about their new environment: talking to Maori and other Pakeha, observing weather patterns and the shifting populations of rabbits, reading newspapers, and going to lectures at the Mechanics' Institute. As the New Zealand environment threw up surprise after surprise, the settlers who succeeded in farming were those who listened closely to the environment. This rich and detailed contribution to environmental history and the literature of British colonial history and farming concludes—contrary to the assertions of some North American environmental historians—that the first generation of European settlers in New Zealand were by no means unthinking agents of change.

A great military history about the early days of the American Revolution, Thomas A. Desjardin's Through a Howling Wilderness is also a timeless adventure narrative that tells of heroic acts, men pitted against nature's fury, and a fledgling nation's fight against a tyrannical oppressor. Before Benedict Arnold was branded a traitor, he was one of the colonies' most valuable leaders. In September 1775, eleven hundred soldiers boarded ships in Massachusetts, bound for the Maine wilderness. They had volunteered for a secret mission, under Arnold's command to march and paddle nearly two hundred miles and seize British Quebec. Before they reached the Canadian border, hundreds died, a hurricane destroyed canoes and equipment and many deserted. In the midst of a howling blizzard, the remaining troops attacked Quebec and almost took Canada from the British simultaneously weakening the British hand against Washington. With the enigmatic Benedict Arnold at its center, Desjardin has written one of the great American adventure stories.

Colonel Oliver Spencer was a Revolutionary War hero forced by post-war poverty to homestead in the -far West,- in the Ohio Valley. This was a dangerous proposition, since Native Americans were numerous and still in possession of the land. In this true story, the American government tried several times to wrest the land in Ohio from the Indians, but the natives spectacularly defeated the first of the military expeditions sent against them. Then Wapawaqua, an Iroquois living with Shawnee Indians, kidnapped the Colonel's son, ten-year-old Ollie Spencer, as the boy returned home from a Fourth of July celebration at Fort Washington in Cincinnati in 1792. This begins the boy's journey to becoming Indian while living with an Iroquois medicine woman and spiritualist, before his eventual rescue through diplomatic means with the aid of President Washington. Even then, the boy's adventure was not over as he began a circuitous and dangerous journey home. Finally, we learn how Ollie and his captors spent the rest of their lives, with the natives eventually fighting on the American side in the War of 1812 and their journey to a reservation in Kansas.