Tag: Frontier

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Daniel Boone: Facts vs. Hearsay

In Hollywood terms, biographies of Daniel Boone might be advertised as, “Based on a true story.” Daniel Boone being known as a legendary Kentucky trailblazer is an undisputed fact in American history. That he was a backcountry militia leader during the Revolutionary War is a fact substantiated primarily by sketchy frontier rosters and pension statements […]

by John L. Smith, Jr.
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Virginia Looking Westward: From Lord Dunmore’s War through the Revolution

Taxation without representation has been the traditionally accepted cause of the American Revolution. Such an understanding of the Revolution, while valid, does not give credit to its complexity. An often-neglected aspect of Virginia’s American Revolution experience is the importance of the frontier. Soil exhaustion, a recurrent problem of Virginia’s tobacco economy, turned planters into land […]

by Thomas Thorleifur Sobol
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The Final Theaters, the Final Fights

The British defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 did little to convince those fighting that peace was near. Gen. George Washington pleaded with his French naval ally, Admiral de Grasse, for a campaign against other British strongholds, perhaps in the Carolinas. When Grasse, instead, returned to the Caribbean, Washington began planning for his 1782 campaign […]

by Don Glickstein
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A Want of Arms in Pennsylvania

Remember when I wrote that nobody ever said life on the Pennsylvania frontier was easy?[1]  Well, as it turns out, it was a lot more difficult than even I previously thought.  Between battling it out with Connecticut Yankees and Indians, dealing with localized violence, and having to put up with a relatively untrained and undisciplined […]

by Thomas Verenna
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The Battle of St. Louis

While the War of American Independence was won on the Eastern seaboard by American and French battling the British, the future of the United States was determined in small, seemingly inconsequential battles in the western theatre. The battles west of the Appalachian Mountains would shape the destiny of the American nation by determining what land would become the United […]

by Jimmy Dick