2016 read #38: The Trees by Conrad Richter.

The Trees by Conrad Richter
304 pages
Published 1940
Read from May 3 to May 5
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

The initial contact period and early European settlement together comprise possibly the most fascinating segment of North American history (though I do wish those terms weren't so innately eurocentric). My interest in those centuries -- running from, say, the Norse voyages up until the aftermath of the Seven Years' War -- was sharpened by Scott Weidensaul's The First Frontier, a rather speculative but nonetheless excellent history of the contact period along the eastern seaboard. It was a time rife with unrealized possibilities, when assimilation and accommodation could have won out against exploitation and extermination, when cultures from opposite ends of the globe met, for a brief time, on nearly equal terms, before disease and enslavement depopulated the native peoples of America. And as a hiker in New York State, I'm prone to fantasizing about when the hills and the woods were less intensively managed, when (to once again put it in eurocentric terms) the Hudson Highlands were the frontier.

Aside from Weidensaul's volume, I've had a difficult time finding history books concerned with this period; the closest matches tend to explore the likes of Jamestown or the Lost Colony or Pilgrims hanging each other up by the Bay, very local and time-limited, nothing as expansive as Frontier. And in fiction, aside from the occasional Pocahontas tale or Salem dramatization, I can't seem to find anything at all. It's as if James Fenimore Cooper preemptively cornered the market on adventure books set on the early cultural frontier. Why are there no "westerns" set on the eastern seaboard?

I happened upon The Trees by accident just the other day, browsing the stacks at my library for anything that might be interesting (because my eighteen page to-read list is never enough). It is, perhaps, the closest approximation I could ask for of my "Appalachian Western" -- a pioneer tale set during European settlement of the Ohio country. It is also, unfortunately, a book from the early 20th century, with all that concomitant baggage. It began strong, with evocative descriptions of the vast old-growth wilderness of the depopulated Ohio hinterlands, and an engaging tale of a single "woodsy" family settling and making a living far from their Pennsylvania homeland. Right around the time that other white families began moving in nearby, however, the book settled into a less interesting string of episodes seemingly compiled from a checklist of Old Timey Frontier Concerns. The magic of the deep woods and its towering trees diminished with every axe blow. And being the product of a male writer from the 20th century, every female point of view is awkwardly framed in terms of growing bodies, budding breasts, appreciative gazes at naked reflections -- because how else would we know that our stalwart storyteller understands the female experience?

My itch for more modern, more progressively-minded adventures of cultural encounter and wilderness life remains unscratched. Surely there have to be latter-day Leatherstocking-esque tales out there?