Dale Van Every's 'Frontier People Of America'
The few thousand Americans west of the mountains upon whom
so large a share of responsibility for their country's destiny
had descended were a unique people. Their like had never been
seen before nor has ever been since. They were as distinct from
their fellow Americans as they were from the alien enemies with whom
they were confronted. They had emerged from the ordinary population
as suddenly as might invaders from another clime and almost as suddenly
they were to merge again with the general citizenry of the republic.
During their brief ascendancy they dominated every crisis with which
they were beset. As befits conquerors, their most striking characteristic
was an assurance of their innate superiority to any antagonist.
- from Dale Van Every's The Ark of Empire , Book 3 of The Frontier People of America
This page grew out of the book review page, since I believe that this
series deserves an area of its own.
Van Every also wrote scripts for films, and even took on the task of
producing the film "Dr. Cyclops".
My original review:
A Company of Heroes
by Dale Van Every
Mentor Books
This out-of-print book is the second in a four-part series called "The Frontier People of America". This volume covers the period of the Revolutionary War, which was very bloody on the frontier. At that time the frontier extended only slightly beyond the Cumberland Gap. These people had traditionally been very dependent on the British Army for defense against the Indians, who saw the settlers as easy game. When they finally had no choice but to stand or die, however, they became a people to be reckoned with. Van Every shows the brutality of both sides in this conflict of races, and the cruelties inflicted by both Tory and Patriot during the long conflict. The suffering of the settlers was beyond anything I had ever read of before. Men took their wives and children to a land without law, and often spent their first winter in a lean-to, so hard was it to clear the land and plant crops for the harvest. The lazy and the weak simply died. This history has not been oft invoked in recent years, perhaps because of concerns about political correctness and sensitivity to Native American concerns. After reading this book, I feel that this has been disastrous for our understanding of the American character, for it was forged in this cauldron of merciless hardship and sorrow. It was on the frontier that our nation was truly born, not in the meeting halls of Philadelphia. If anything, the war in the frontier (and with it the Revolution) would have been lost had it been left up to the Continental Congress. The war was, with few exceptions, a very local affair, with Virginia bearing most of the burden. Van Every is not blind to the great crimes committed by bands of settlers upon Indian women and children, but he does not shy from telling every inhuman detail of native atrocities upon isolated farm families. One interesting contrast lies in what each side found shocking in the acts of the other. Infanticide was apparently a regular feature of Indian raids upon whites, but they were shocked when white raiders raped Indian women, since for a native to take a white woman captive he had to provide for her as his wife and a member of the tribe. This also applied to white children of working age. Whites, on the other hand, generally killed captives or released them, never incorporating them into settler communities. All in all, an amazing book, sadly out of print. I’m eager to find and read the rest of this amazing series.
Here are the rest in the series:
I now have all 4 of these books, on Mentor paperbacks. I will post scans and reviews as I read them.
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