The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of

Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early

America by Scott Weidensaul

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Original Title: The First Frontier

ISBN: 0151015155
ISBN13: 9780151015153
Autor: Scott Weidensaul
Rating: 4.1 of 5 stars (1747) counts
Original Format: Hardcover, 496 pages
Download Format: PDF, RTF, ePub, CHM, MP3.
Published: February 8th 2012 / by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / (first published January 1st 2012)
Language: English
Genre(s):
History- 55 users
Nonfiction- 26 users
North American Hi... >American History- 22 users
Historical- 3 users
Native Americans- 2 users
United States- 2 users
War- 2 users

Description:

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
frontierthe 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 groundwhen 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 storieslike 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 Americas tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.

About Author:
Born in 1959, Scott Weidensaul (pronounced "Why-densaul") has lived almost all of his life among
the long ridges and endless valleys of eastern Pennsylvania, in the heart of the central
Appalachians, a landscape that has defined much of his work.
His writing career began in 1978 with a weekly natural history column in the local newspaper, the
Pottsville Republican in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. The column soon led
a fulltime reporting job, which he held until 1988, when he left to become a freelance writer
specializing in nature and wildlife. (He continued to write about nature for newspapers, however,
including long-running columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Harrisburg Patriot-News.)
Weidensaul has written more than two dozen books, including his widely acclaimed Living on the
Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (North Point 1999), which was a finalist for the
2000 Pulitzer Prize.
Weidensaul's writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Audubon (for which he is a
contributing editor), Nature Conservancy and National Wildlife, among many others. He lectures
widely on conservation and nature, and directs the ornithological programs for National Audubon's
famed Hog Island Center on the coast of Maine.
In addition to writing about wildlife, Weidensaul is an active field researcher whose work focuses
on bird migration. Besides banding hawks each fall (something he's done for nearly 25 years), he
directs a major effort to study the movements of northern saw-whet owls, one of the smallest and
least-understood raptors in North America. He is also part of a continental effort to understand the
rapid evolution, by several species of western hummingbirds, of a new migratory route and
wintering range in the East.
- excerpted from his website

Other Editions:

- The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America
(Kindle Edition)

- The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America
(Audiobook - Audible download)
- The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America
(ebook)

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

Books By Author:

- Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds

 - The Ghost with Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search
for Lost Species

- Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding

- Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul

- Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians

Books In The Series:

Related Books On Our Site:

 - White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial
America

- War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of
America's First Frontier

- Bloody Mohawk: The French and Indian War & American Revolution on New
York's Frontier

- The Jamestown Project

 - The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of
Civilizations, 1600-1675

- Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson

- Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North
America, 1754-1766

- Betsy Ross and the Making of America

 - West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776

- The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America

- Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the
Birth of Liberty

- King Philip's War: The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict
 - Empires at War: The French and Indian War and the Struggle for North
America, 1754-1763

- The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (Pivotal
Moments in American History)

- Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon

- Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World
 - Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past

- A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of
Roanoke

Rewiews:

Dec 10, 2011

Holly Weiss
Rated it: it was amazing
Shelves: to-review, kindle, 2012-release, history, non-fiction
Scott Weidensaul takes us back to the true frontier, The First Frontier, where lands east of the
Hudson and Delaware were hotly contested for two centuries before the American Revolution.
People who laid claim to the eastern seaboard came with ambiguous motives from unimaginably
different cultures and lands. Although cohabiting the land, they communicated poorly and
remained estranged. This peerlessly researched book opens our eyes to a violent time in the
history of America of which most of us
Scott Weidensaul takes us back to the true frontier, The First Frontier, where lands east of the
Hudson and Delaware were hotly contested for two centuries before the American Revolution.
People who laid claim to the eastern seaboard came with ambiguous motives from unimaginably
different cultures and lands. Although cohabiting the land, they communicated poorly and
remained estranged. This peerlessly researched book opens our eyes to a violent time in the
history of America of which most of us are uninformed. One would think that as time went by, civil
co-habitation would occur, but the author tells us, Far from being a cordial melting pot, the frontier
was becoming an increasingly fractious mishmash.
Part One entrenches us in the various cultures of these early inhabitants of eastern America. Part
Two describes the 17th century expansion of the American colonies around Chesapeake Bay and
New England, resulting in hatred, fear and bloodshed. Part Three is the story of the farther frontier,
the Pennsylvania backcountry, where today a marker proclaiming the site of the first Amish
settlement reminds us of the ghosts of that time.
Interesting details from the book include:
- 90% of Americas native people lost their lives from foreign disease not long after European
colonists arrived.
- A white woman released from Native American captivity returned home to write the first
American bestseller. Mary Rowlandson was the first female writer to publish in North America.
- Brickmaker, Thomas Duston, must choose between saving his bedridden wife or his children
from the Indians.
- Commercial slave trading boomed on both sides in the 1700s.
- The scrupulous honesty of William Penn earned subsequent respect from the Lenape tribe.
- Fur traders regularly married into Indian society to gain access to their wives connections.
- A daughter held captive for a decade recognized her real mother only after hearing her sing an
old German hymn.
Although at times plodding, this is first-rate storytelling. The fascinating tales of individuals
involved in the clash are interwoven with disturbing accounts of violence and war. The time the
reader invests in this time period long left fallow by historians pens pays first-rate educational
dividends.
The detail in The First Frontier can be daunting to the casual reader. Not for the faint of heart, the
book accurately describes the many atrocities of the times. The book is intended to instruct and
inform, not to entertain. The payoff for one truly interested in Americas beginnings is intellectually
rewarding to one willing to spend time in its pages. Copious notes attest to the exhaustive
research poured into the book. Highly recommended.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt through Netgalley graciously provided the review copy.
Reviewed by Holly Weiss, author of Crestmont
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