Letters from the West

In 1820, a young lawyer named James Hall boarded a keelboat in Pittsburgh and began a journey that would take him down the Ohio River into the newly opened frontier of the Old Northwest. The letters he wrote along the way, later revised and published in London in 1828, form one of the most vivid and wide-eyed accounts of early American frontier life ever committed to paper. Hall encounters Daniel Boone, witnesses the falls of the Ohio, arrives in the raw settlement of Cincinnati, and settles in Shawneetown, Illinois. But these are far more than travelogues. He writes of the Harpe Brothers, those murderous bandits still roaming the wilderness; of Burr's mysterious conspiracy; of General Arthur St. Clair's political downfall; of Harman Blennerhassett and his doomed island paradise. He observes the manners of backwoodsmen and regulators, catalogs the superstitions that grip river communities, and reports on the great debates of the era: internal improvements, the Cumberland Road, the future of a nation still finding itself. Hall was soldier, lawyer, judge, newspaper editor, historian, and the first publisher of a literary magazine west of Pittsburgh. His curiosity was boundless, his prose immediate. Two centuries later, these letters remain a time machine: step inside and hear the river lap against the hull, smell the woodsmoke, feel the frontier stretching out ahead, waiting to be made.