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

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.

• Bloody Mohawk: The French and Indian War & American Revolution on New York's Frontier
• 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
• Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution (Pivotal Moments in American History)
• The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America (P.S.)
• Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766
• Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West
• Dunmore's War: The Last Conflict of America's Colonial Era
• Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776
• Blood on the Ohio: Frontier Tales of Terror