This book begins with a helpful subtitled “Table of Contents”. This is followed by a five-page “Introduction” that argues for the need to expand the early American literary canon to include representative selections of works by largely forgotten “Old North-West” pioneer writers. The book focuses especially on those who wrote informative, readable journals, memoirs, and letter collections that were published in the early nineteenth century, but have since been largely overlooked. The core of the text, following the “Introduction,” consists of six chapters focusing on six pioneer authors, three men and three women. The chapters are arranged in chronological historic order, beginning in the 1790s and ending in the 1850s.

Three of these pioneer authors were native-born Americans from New England. Mrs. Christiana Holmes Tillson, from Massachusetts, at age seventy, was urged by her family to write a memoir of her challenging early days as a young bride in the 1820s on the largely unsettled West Central Illinois frontier. Mr. Daniel Harmon Brush, from Vermont, also settled in sparsely populated Southern Illinois in the 1820s. His memoir covers the years of his enterprising life from 1820 to 1861. Mrs. Juliette Magill Kinzie, from Connecticut, authored a lengthy autobiographical narrative that traces her life in the early 1830s in the old Michigan Territory (now Wisconsin) from the time of her marriage to her Indian agent husband, John Kinzie, and their life at Fort Winnebago among the Indian tribes they loved, supported, and protected, to their permanent move to inherited riverfront acreage in Chicago in 1833.

The three other authors included in this book were educated, literate British emigrants. The first, Mr. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, originally emigrated as a young boy with his parents from Scotland to Pennsylvania where he lived in a Scots-Irish farm settlement in York County. After completing his education at Princeton and moving into Western Pennsylvania in the 1790s, as a practicing attorney, he served as a conciliatory figure in the infamous 1794 “Whiskey Rebellion.” In 1795, he published the first account of the rebellion, an early foreshadowing of future Old North-West divisive sectional conflicts. The second British author, Mrs. Rebecca Burlend from West Yorkshire, emigrated with her family to the West-Central Illinois wilderness in 1831. Her memoir, first published in 1848 in England, was intended for the enlightenment of potential UK emigrants, especially women, who were contemplating making the arduous journey to America. The sixth author, Mr. Edwin Bottomley, also from West Yorkshire, emigrated with his family to South-Eastern Wisconsin in the 1840s, where he had the good fortune to affiliate with a territorial Racine County “English Settlement.” His collection of letters mailed “home” to England were also intended for the benefit of West Yorkshire emigrants known to the family who were contemplating making the strenuous transatlantic journey and coping with the hard demands of life on what was, at the time, the relatively uninhabited American “Old North-West” frontier.

I envision this book as becoming a choice for classroom reading, either assigned or recommended, in a variety of regional literacy, regional history, and general communication studies contexts. The book should also appeal to a broad range of readers, especially those interested in regional American literature and history and those in the trade market simply looking for a good read about a subject likely unfamiliar to them and through which they can learn something about how American pioneers managed to cope, to live, and get by daily without losing faith in the “American dream.” It salutes those hearty Old North-West pioneers and their “indomitable perseverance,” to quote Mrs. Christiana Tillson from a letter written to her daughter who asked why, after so many years had passed, she now, in 1871, wanted to write a memoir about her adventures as an untested bride going west into the frontier in the 1820s. She responded, “Those who now go to the Far West can look forward to a rapid improvement.... They can have but little idea of the discouragements the young adventurers of that Country must have encountered. Nothing but a most indomitable perseverance could have caused them to remain, and I have felt like attributing to them a higher commendation than has yet been accorded to such.”

I also envision a potential British market for this book, owing especially to Mr. Hugh Brackenridge’s Scottish roots, his early education while growing up in a frontier Scots-Irish settlement, and his evident interest in the writings of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers while a student in the Scottish Presbyterian schools of York County, Pennsylvania. He was familiar with a rich variety of works by British authors, noticeably Samuel Butler’s Hudibras and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, both of which influenced the development of his talented satirical writing skills. Furthermore, two of the pioneer families treated in this book, the Burlends, who settled in Central Illinois, and the Bottomleys, who settled in Southeastern Wisconsin in what was known at the time as the “English Settlement,” were also British emigrants from West Yorkshire, whose deep ties to their English roots shaped the focus of their memoirs, their letters home, and their dreams for a better future in America’s “Old North-West.”

The six authors covered in this book, four from Illinois, one from South-Eastern Wisconsin, and one from Western Pennsylvania, offer informative details about the daily struggle to survive and what it was like to try to live strictly off the “Country,” the land, in the actual wilderness during those early frontier days prior to the settling of the Old North-West. Not to be forgotten or ignored, it was also a settling, which, unfortunately, was also determined by the injustices done to the First People, those tribes that lost all their lands and their hunting grounds, a fact that Mrs. Juliette Kinzie, the subject of Chapter 4, who had day-to-day dealings with various tribal members living in or around Fort Winnebago, wrote about at some length and with great empathy. The harsh reality that continues to shadow the ongoing First People question even today is that, no matter what the legal circumstances were in terms of land distribution between pioneer settlers and the First People, those early pioneers would not and could not be deterred. In spite of the threats to both their own safety and the security of their families, as well as the injustices associated with land claims and distribution, the “indomitable” ones, like the six pioneers in this book, just kept on coming.

Franklin E. Court, Emeritus Professor of English at Northern Illinois University, is the author of five books and a score of journal and magazine articles mostly on subjects related to British literary history and the history of English studies both in the UK and the USA. His books include Pater and His Early Critics (1980); Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750-1900 (1992); The Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in Early America (2001); and Pioneers of Ecological Restoration: The People and Legacy of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum (2012). He is also the author-editor of Walter Pater: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography of Writing about Him (1980). In his retirement, he has become particularly interested in the literary history of the early North-West Territory east of the Mississippi River, also known as the “Old North-West.” Six Pioneer Accounts of Life on the Old North-West American Frontier, 1790-1850 is the product of that ongoing interest.

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