To discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women's writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated. Both intellectual and cultural history, this volume continues Kolodny's study of frontier mythology begun in The Lay of the Land.

The adventures of Daniel Boone, rendered in verse.

American Stories follows the evolution of our founding stories and myths and how they spread far and wide throughout our history. The story of the cherry tree, for example, tells us nothing about George Washington’s actual childhood, but surely it tells us something about what Americans wanted in the father of their country—an incorruptible leader of the people. Along the same lines, the story of Betsy Ross’s flag tells us nothing about how the Stars and Stripes came to be, but does tell us something about what Americans wanted in a founding mother—it is no coincidence that the Ross story, featuring a traditional woman’s role of sewing at home, was first told in 1870, one year after Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony challenged these roles by founding the National Woman Suffrage Association. There’s another reason these stories spread, and that provides another reason to follow their evolution. From Dodge City to Deadwood, and from Bunker Hill to San Juan Hill and beyond, these stories all have one thing in common: they are all a lot of fun to read.

The Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone: The First Settler of Kentucky, written in 1833, is an embellished account of Daniel Boone's life by Timothy Flint. Like other authors, Flint interviewed Boone for details, but he added his own version of events, making Boone fight bears, escape rampant Indians on a swinging vine, and forming him into an all-around backwoodsman hero. The retelling made the book one of the best-selling biographies of the 1800s, was the inspiration for literary figures like Davy Crockett, Don Juan, and Tarzan, and continues to influence the public picture of the nature man type even today.TIMOTHY FLINT (1780-1840) was a clergyman and scientist from Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard in 1800 and became a pastor for the Congregational Church in Lunenburg, Massachusetts in 1802. Because of the many chemistry experiments he conducted (which no one understood), Flint was accused of counterfeiting money, to which he responded with a slander lawsuit. As a result, he left his congregation to travel along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers as a missionary for almost eight years. In addition to clergy work, Flint edited and contributed to Knickerbocker and Western Review magazines and wrote several books, essays, and short stories, most of which focused on backwoods and missionary life.