I'm a sucker for anything pertaining to Frontier history.
I will say that I rank the author of this book, James Alexander Thom up there with Alan W Eckert as a master of exaustively researched fictionalized representation of true events, Thom's "Panther in the Sky", an account of the Shawnee leader Techumseh, being a classic of the genre.
"The Red Heart" is an unusual book of the type in that it focuses upon the life of Francis Slocum, a Quaker girl carried away at age eight during a 1778 Delaware raid near present-day Wilkes-Barre, Pa and subsequently living the remaining sixty two years of her life first as a Delaware and then married into the Miami Tribe.
Hardly any fighting described, critics will say too it glossed over both the Indian torture of captives and the killing of Indians by other Indians.
But what it is IS an excellent portrayal of what it was probably like to live on the OTHER side of the Frontier from a non-combatant's point of view, the advance of said Frontier being regarded as a series of collapses,usually accompnied by catastrophe.
A story of steadily dwindling family and friends, usually directly or indirectly at the hands of Whites.
I never thought about it before too, but several Indians suffering forced removal to the West as late as the 1840's were actually survivors of violent events going clear back to the time of the American Revolution.
A good book too in that is doesn't stop at the time of the settlement of the Frontier, but continues on to detail events AFTER the shooting had stopped, and what happened to the Miamis in the decades when they were surrounded by a flood of settlement on steadily dwindling amounts of reserved land,
I give it two thumbs up.
Birdwatcher
