Frontier expansion ruses basis of Ted Morgan history book

Runs Like Cougar

  There are many great books on the invasion and settling of North America by Europeans and another great book in this collection is Ted Morgan's "Wilderness At Dawn". This book covers all the frontiers of North America and how they steadily encroached on the lands of Native Americans pushing them west of the Mississippi . Relying on journals and diaries of early pioneers Morgan does a excellent narrative of frontier life between settlers and Indians on all the various diverse colonial borderlands that made up the settling of North America. Morgan begins the book with the usual migrations from Bering sea and then includes the early Spanish and French presence in North America but this is a book that looks at all aspects of life on the various frontiers of the English colonies. the perspective of White settlers and Indian residents through various frontiers fro Jamestown, Dutch, Puritan, Pilgrim, Chesapeake, Quaker, and black is studied and accounted throughout the book. Morgan even gives vital information on the German Carolinian Salzburger frontier and the fact that some of these early European separatist colonies and encroachments eventually did fail from native resistance. This is a book more about the frontier and early settlers than Native Americans though it goes into many dramas between these settlers and the original inhabitants of the lands hose only eventual lose was through massive migrations of people pushing these frontiers westward often displacing peoples in pursuit of land surveying and private property profiteering that was against everything native society was about. Life was not easy for any peoples through this rugged environment whose lack of law and order was often the carriage that encouraged so much of this fraudulent migration from the coast into the hinterlands that belonged to the Indians. Ted Morgan is a superior writer whose books are well known and his ability to describe the intricacies of these early planting societies and the stratagem of these erly pioneers into creating more land sales and deception of Indian lands enables this system to grow and spread out West. Morgan exposes such of these as the walking purchase of 1737 where the Delaware Indians agreed to a walking land purchase settlement and basically the settlers used fast runners to deceive Indians of this agreement and increase land theft.