2013 read #124: The First Frontier by Scott Weidensaul.

The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, & Endurance in Early America by Scott Weidensaul
400 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 24 to September 26
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I think I've mentioned before how I prefer the older end of history. I think World War I is far more interesting than World War II. The late Middle Ages don't interest me nearly as much as the early Middle Ages. I prefer the Greeks to the Romans. My favorite temple site is Göbekli Tepe. Naturally, my favorite period in American-European interaction begins with Skraelings and Vikings and ends with the Seven Years War, when celebrity names like George Washington and Ben Franklin begin to appear. I was immediately sold on the description of The First Frontier: "Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground."

Weidensaul's writing is engaging in the mold of experiential, interpretive history, beginning chapters with in media res point-of-view descriptions, a gimmick that oversteps the known facts of encounter to create a more vivid impression on the reader. I'm not sure how I feel about that, especially the part about going beyond the facts; a similar gimmick animates Steven Mithen's excellent After the Ice, but where Mithen takes care to separate his interpretive fiction from the actual finds of archaeology, you wouldn't know what's fact and what's extrapolation in Weidensaul's account unless you made careful study of the end notes. Which is unfortunate, given how little is actually known of contact period native cultures and early encounters, and how much room for interpretation there is within the limited sources. (Weidensaul presents as fact the idea that Basque fishers and whalers, and other seaborne entrepreneurs of western Europe, were in contact with the people of the eastern American seaboard for "centuries" before any official European explorers arrived, which, while plausible, was still conjecture last time I checked.) It's clear Weidensaul did his research, retrieving loads of interesting factoids from various records and garbled accounts, but at this point I think I would like a huge tome filled with primary sources, with only minimal glossing to provide context and possible interpretations of events.