One of the earliest attempts by an American writer to construct a usable past for the young republic, this 1799 chronicle traces Ohio from the retreat of glaciers through the sophisticated earthwork civilizations of the Mound Builders to the turbulent first decades of European contact. Howells writes with the confident curiosity of a man piecing together a still-mysterious history, giving us the 'Ice Folk' who hunted mammoth along vanishing ice sheets, the mysterious mound-builders whose geometric precision still confounded early antiquarians, and the French traders who first threaded the territory's rivers. What emerges is not mere chronology but something stranger: an early American vision of deep time, of ancient peoples whose artifacts were already being unearthed by Ohio farmers, whose languages were already lost, whose stories could only be guessed at. The book matters because it captures a particular American moment, just after independence, when writers were urgently inventing origins for a nation that seemed both ancient and startlingly new. For readers interested in early American literature, frontier history, or the persistent American impulse to narrate the land into being.
