Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks

Résumé du livre

In the winter of 1818 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft set out from Potosi, Missouri, to document lead mines in the interior of the Ozarks, then a wilderness of near-virgin forests, limestone cliffs, prairies, and oak savannahs. Intending only to make his fortune by publishing an account of the area's mineral resources, he became the first skilled observer to witness and record frontier life in the Ozarks. The journal he kept as he traveled ninety days in the rugged terrain of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas was originally published in 1821 and has become an essential record of Ozark territorial society and natural history. In it we meet some of the earliest American settlers of the region - M'Gary, the Cokers, the Yocums - and experience the excitement of a bear hunt, the joy of discovering a honey tree, the difficulties of passing over the Bull Shoals of the White River, the beauty of large open prairies, and the wealth of wildlife once found in the Ozarks. In Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks, Milton Rafferty places Schoolcraft's journal in its historical context and makes it, and the traveler's route, more accessible to the modern reader. Rafferty describes the geologic processes which formed the Ozarks, the major natural features of the region, and the great changes that have been made to the landscape by the recent growth of population.