The Frontiersmen: A Narrative

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Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2001 - Biography & Autobiography - 626 pages
Against the background of such names as George Rogers Clark, Daniel Boone. Arthur St. Clair, Anthony Wayne, Simon Girty, and William Henry Harrison, Eckert has recreated the life of one of America's most outstanding heroes, Simon Kenton. Kenton's role in opening the Northwest Territory to settlement more than rivaled that of his friend Daniel Boone. By his eighteenth birthday, Kenton had already won frontier renown as woodsman, fighter, and scout. His incredible physical strength and endurance, his great dignity and innate kindness made him the ideal prototype of the frontier hero. The Frontiersmen is equally the story of one of history's greatest leaders, whose misfortune was to be born to a doomed cause and a dying race. Tecumseh, the brilliant Shawnee chief, welded together by the sheer force of his intellect and charisma and incredible Indian confederacy that thrust of the white man's westward expansion. Like Kenton, Tecumseh was the paragon of his people's virtues.

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About the author (2001)

Allan W. Eckert was born in Buffalo, New York on January 30, 1931. He served in the United States Air Force and attended the University of Dayton and Ohio State University. He was a historian, naturalist, novelist, poet, screenwriter and playwright. He wrote over 40 books during his lifetime including A Time of Terror: The Great Dayton Flood, Wild Season, The Silent Sky, The Frontiersmen, Wilderness Empire, The Conquerors, and A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh, which were all nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. He received the Newbery Honor Book Award for Incident at Hawk's Hill. He also wrote almost all of the scripts for television's Wild Kingdom and adapted The Frontiersmen into the play Tecumseh! He died of prostate cancer on July 7, 2011 at the age of 80.