The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America - Hardcover

by Scott Weidensaul (Author)

Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier--the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.

Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground--when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.

The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories--like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America's tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.

Front Jacket

Frontier the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.
Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.
"The First Frontier" traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America s tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.
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Back Jacket

Advance praise for "The First Frontier"
"Excitement abounds in Scott Weidensaul s detailed history of the first clashes between European settlers and Native Americans on the East Coast. By turns bloody and gruesome, poignant and haunting, The First Frontier reminds us that neither side in this 'disturbing, in-between world' was wholly in the right." Nancy Marie Brown, author of "The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman"
In this charming and fascinating chronicle . . . Weidensaul s delightful storytelling brings to life the terrors and hopes of the earliest days of America. "Publisher s Weekly"
In this comprehensive chronicle . . . Weidensaul weaves together an impressive number of true stories. . . . any reader who picks it up will get a very real picture of what it was like to live and die in the New World. "Kirkus Reviews"

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Author Biography

Author and naturalist SCOTT WEIDENSAUL, who grew up in the heart of the old eastern frontier and has always been curious to learn more about it, has written more than two dozen books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds.