The First Frontier Quotes

“Wherever you set foot—on a street in Manhattan as you dodge traffic; on the soft, freshly turned earth of a Hudson Valley farm; on the kelpy tide line below a Maine cottage; or in the pine woods and palmetto thickets of the Carolina Low Country—do not forget that this was once frontier.”
― Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

“By the early eighteenth century, however, recognition of racial lines was beginning to crystallize. In Carolina in the late 1600s, the slave-owning immigrants from Barbados already thought in terms of black and white, and it is here that some of the earliest self-references to “white” appear.”
― Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

“Instead, he sent Céloron with 20 soldiers and officers and 180 Canadian militia of questionable value. They were accompanied by only 30 Abenakis and French Iroquois; the large contingent of Indians expected to join them from Detroit, knowing a lost cause when they saw one, decided they had better things to do.”
― Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

“Like many diseases, syphilis has become steadily less potent with time, since venereal diseases spread more readily when their carriers do not look like something from a horror movie; carriers with less virulent strains proved with time to be the more effective vectors.”
― Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

“By a.d. 1100, the city of Cahokia, close to modern St. Louis, boasted a four-tier, flat-topped pyramid, which was made of 22 million cubic feet of soil and had a base measuring almost a thousand feet on each side. With a population of fifteen thousand to thirty thousand, Cahokia would have put medieval London to shame. It was the largest city north of Mexico until 1775, when New York finally surpassed it. Yet Cahokia was just one of a number of large urban and ceremonial centers in the same region.”
― Scott Weidensaul, The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America