Reviewed by Christopher Iannini | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.1

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Reviewed by Christopher Iannini | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Christopher Iannini, McNeil Center for Early American Studies

From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749–1826. By Thomas Hallock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 312 pages. $55.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).
Frederick Jackson Turner would not recognize the frontier in Thomas Hallock's innovative and challenging new book. In recent decades historians have redefined that much-maligned term to denote a highly contested zone of intercultural encounter rather than a stage in the inevitable advance of European civilization over a savage wilderness.¹ In From the Fallen Tree, a literary scholar joins this revisionist effort by turning to a set of authors and texts long associated with a mythic western conquest. Hallock's basic insight is that late colonial and early national writers "forged their impressions of the physical environment against still populated frontiers" (24). The images of nature and environmental change that emerge from these frontiers, he argues, must be understood as arguments for possession and "artifacts of social exchange" (24). In his capable hands, frontier writings become "surprisingly subtle narrative registers" (77) of the ways that power and identity were negotiated, contested, and enforced on volatile backcountry terrain.	1
A thoughtful introduction attempts to open a dialogue between ecological criticism and new western history. Hallock suggests that these scholarly camps, preoccupied with the study of later eras, turn their attention to the frontier writings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Efforts to claim backcountry lands inspired an eclectic outpouring of natural histories, topographical descriptions, captivity narratives, letters, journals, and novels that Hallock usefully defines as "cartographic texts" (23). Such texts did, indeed, depict an idealized West, in which commercial value was latent in a landscape awaiting Euro-American civilization. The need to account for the interests and motives of native peoples, however, forced authors to improvise flexible new verbal forms. The embodiment of racial conflicts too often ignored by ecological critics makes these frontier narratives far less seamless and monolithic than new western historians have frequently assumed.	. . .

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