Every significant aspect of daily life on the American frontier is vividly brought to life in text and more than 200 drawings in this companion book to the author's Colonial Living. With all the clarity, vigor and accuracy of a true master craftsman, Mr. Tunis describes the character and ways of life of the men and womn who were the harsh cutting edge of our civilization: their dwellings, clothing, food, furniture, household articles; their hunting, farming, schooling, transportation, government; their amusements, susperstitions, and religion.

In his foreward, the author writes: "We all know that the hardy cowhand...is the world-wide symbol of the American Frontier, and many of us asume that the frontier began at Dodge City, Kansas. It actually started quite a long way east of the cow country, and there was a lot more to frontier living than running gun fights."

So from its very beginning during Revolutionary times, we follow the tide of white men which ran ever westward across our continent for almost two centuries—from the first push away from seaboard colonies inland to the Piedmont, through the wilderness into the Southern valleys and over the Appalachians, beyond the Mississippi to the fertile prairies and the Southwest, and finally over mountain trails to the Far West. Here is the forest frontiersman in his log cabin, the ranchero in his casa, the sodbuster in his prairie sod house. Here, too, is the keelboatman, the cotton farmer, the fur trader, the mountain man, the forty-niner, the cowhand—each helping to shape a new and distinctive way of life from untamed country. The flintlock gun, the Kentucky rifle, the freight and Conestoga wagons, the stage coach, the Ohio flatboat, the first steamboat and steam railroad, are all reconstructed in exact detail. 

Enlightening and highly entertaining, this authentic re-creation of the American frontier, seen in relation to its historical perspective by a distinguished author and artist, is a major contribution toward an understanding of the American character.

From the dust jacket