Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley. By Elizabeth A. Perkins. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xviii, 253 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-8078-2400-3. Paper, $17.95, isbn 0-8078-4703-8.)

In recent years, considerable historical literature has appeared that examines the settlement of the trans-Appalachian West. Elizabeth A. Perkins's Border Life adds to this growing literature. Her study examines "the motivations and aspirations of ordinary settlers" who poured into the Ohio River basin after 1770. Perkins uses travel accounts and other evidence in her study, but Border Life is built primarily around three hundred interviews conducted by the Presbyterian minister John Danby Shane. He wandered in the area in the mid-nineteenth century collecting material and planning a grand narrative history of western settlement. This fascinating source base allows Perkins to probe the frontier migrants' lives, but it also hinders the examination of the region's settlement over time. The result is a book filled with interesting insights that fails fully to reach its potential. 1

Border Life is divided into five chapters, with an introduction and two appendices. The first of these is a well-laid out sketch of John Shane's life. Perkins evaluates Shane's skills as an interviewer and probes the ways that memory shapes perception. This is critical since most of the people Shane interviewed were in old age, recalling incidents decades old. Thus her examination of memory is both necessary and helpful. . . .

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