As part of the regional revival, this recreates vigorously, vividly, the rude, reckless, shiftless, stoic life of the Dixie frontier, - the men and women who settled there in new country. Opened up by Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road in 1775, larger migrations were to follow:- squatters, the "cutting edge of the frontier", planters and their slaves, land speculators. Here was the life in stations and on plantations, early methods of marketing and trading, the social occasions, the sports-which were sanguinary, the formation of new towns, schools- as they grew up, religion (in pretty general lack) and revivalism, law, justice and politics, food and clothes, idiosyncrasies of speech and behaviour, Indians- and the militia. ?? A portrait of a section and a phase of America which does not lack for colorful, informative detail. (Kirkus Reviews)