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.