Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1789-90

In the winter of 1789, a twenty-four-year-old New Jersey man named Samuel Forman joins his uncle General David Forman's emigrating party and sets off down rivers that will soon become the arteries of American expansion. The Ohio and Mississippi of 1789 are not yet tamed. This is America before its mythology hardened, and Forman records what he sees with the fresh eyes of someone standing at the edge of the known world. He describes the brutal weather, the rough terrain, the logistics of moving a large party through wilderness, and the encounters with enslaved people, Native Americans, and frontier authorities that together composed daily life on the American frontier. The narrative was not written down until 1849, sixty years after the journey, yet Forman's memory proved remarkably vivid. This is history remembered as lived, not revised through the lens of national myth. For readers who crave authentic accounts of early American expansion, this slim volume offers an unvarnished look at the rivers, roads, and people who shaped a nation before it had finished being born.