Reprint of the original, first published in 1862.

Autobiography of a traveling preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

Excerpt from Experiences of a Backwoods Preacher: Or, Facts and Incidents Culled From Thirty Years of Ministerial Life But while all this is true, there are many incidents in almost any lengthened life that are of sufficient importance to deserve a record. In this chapter I propose to relate a few incidents in my own life before I commence to give the experiences that I have had as a /minister in the backwoods. I was born in the township of Clinton, in the county of Lincoln, Upper Canada, May fourth, eighteen hun dred and nineteen. My parents were both children of U. E. Loyalists, so that on both sides I claim descent from those whose loyalty cost them something, and whose attachment to Britain and her institutions led them to leave good homes in the States and come into the wilderness of Canada to make new homes for themselves, where, under the protection of the British flag, they might be safe, and under the Shade of the maple leaf they might be contented. My father did military duty during the last year of the war of eighteen hundred and twelve, and at the close of the war he was granted land in what was then called the new purchase, on the north of Lake Ontario. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book compares the nineteenth-century settler literatures of Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States in order to examine how they enable readers to manage guilt accompanying European settlement. Reading canonical texts such as Last of the Mohicans and Backwoods of Canada against underanalyzed texts such as Adventures in Canada and George Linton or the First Years of a British Colony, it demonstrates how tropes like the settler hero and his indigenous servant, the animal hunt, the indigenous attack, and the lost child cross national boundaries. Settlers similarly responded to the stressors of taking another’s land through the stories they told about themselves, which functioned to defend against uncomfortable feelings of guilt and ambivalence by creating new versions of reality. This book traces parallels in 20th and 21st century texts to ultimately argue that contemporary settlers continue to fight similar psychological and cultural battles since settlement is never complete.