The Undiscovered Country

The title, drawn from Shakespeare's Hamlet, frames the central irony of American westward expansion: the conquest of the West built a new nation but destroyed the peoples and lands already there. Spanning from 1755 to 1890, the narrative follows seven biographical protagonists: Daniel Boone, William Weatherford (Red Eagle), Davy Crockett, Mangas Coloradas, Kit Carson, Sitting Bull, and William "Buffalo Bill" Cody. Their intertwined lives carry forward a story of triumph and tragedy across four generations.

The book opens with Boone in 1774, traveling alone to rebury his eldest son James, killed by Shawnee, Delaware, and Cherokee warriors. The narrative reaches back to the 1750s, when Virginia sent twenty-one-year-old George Washington to warn the French away from the Ohio Country, igniting the Seven Years' War. In 1755, Major General Edward Braddock's army was ambushed near the Monongahela River. Twenty-year-old Boone served as a teamster on this doomed expedition, where he met John Findley, a frontiersman whose tales of Kentucky fired Boone's lifelong obsession with the land beyond the mountains.

The fall of French power opened the Ohio Country to British traders and speculators, but the Ottawa leader Pontiac rallied a pan-tribal coalition in 1763, attacking British forts across the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. Colonel Henry Bouquet defeated the Indian forces at Bushy Run and relieved Fort Pitt. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, intended to protect Native lands west of the Appalachians, was widely ignored by speculators, including Washington, who secretly surveyed and claimed western territory.

Boone's exploration of Kentucky began in 1769, when he crossed Cumberland Gap and found a hunter's paradise. In 1775, he led settlers through the gap along what became the Wilderness Road. Judge Richard Henderson purchased 20 million acres from the Cherokees, though Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe warned that the American appetite for land was insatiable. Boonesborough was established on the Kentucky River, and Boone guided his family and other pioneers, including the grandparents of Abraham Lincoln, to settle there.

The Revolutionary War engulfed the frontier. Boone's daughter Jemima and two companions were kidnapped by Indians in 1776, and Boone's dramatic rescue became legend. Captured by the Shawnee chief Blackfish in 1778 and adopted into the tribe, Boone escaped to warn Boonesborough and led its defense during a nine-day siege. He was court-martialed but acquitted. Meanwhile, frontier riflemen destroyed British and Loyalist forces at Kings Mountain and Cowpens in the Carolinas. Boone's son Israel was killed at the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782. Boone eventually moved to Spanish Missouri, where he died in 1820.

The narrative introduces William Weatherford, born in 1781 to a Scottish trader and a Creek woman of the Wind Clan. His uncle, Alexander McGillivray, the most powerful Creek leader, played the Americans, Spanish, and British against each other until his death in 1793. The book also traces Davy Crockett's childhood in eastern Tennessee. When the Shawnee leader Tecumseh visited the Creeks in 1811 to call for pan-tribal resistance, Weatherford opposed him, but the New Madrid earthquake seemed to fulfill Tecumseh's prophecy and ignited the Red Stick War, a civil conflict led by militant Upper Creek warriors. The massacre at Fort Mims in August 1813 drew Major General Andrew Jackson and young volunteer Crockett into the Creek War. Jackson's victory at Horseshoe Bend in 1814 ended Creek resistance; Weatherford surrendered personally to Jackson, who spared his life. The Treaty of Fort Jackson stripped the Creeks of 22 million acres.

The book follows Crockett's rise as a congressman and national symbol. His opposition to Jackson's Indian removal policy cost him reelection. Defeated in 1835, he headed to Texas. At the Alamo on March 6, 1836, the army of Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna overwhelmed the 185 defenders. Crockett was among a handful captured and executed on Santa Anna's orders. Texan army commander Sam Houston's victory at San Jacinto secured Texas independence.

The narrative shifts to Kit Carson and the fur trade era. Carson ran away from a saddler's apprenticeship in 1826 and joined the mountain men in the Rockies. His collaboration with Lieutenant John Charles Frémont on three expeditions from 1842 to 1846 mapped the Oregon Trail, explored the Great Basin and California, and helped trigger the Bear Flag Revolt, an American settler uprising against Mexican rule. During the Mexican-American War, Carson guided Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny to California, where the disastrous Battle of San Pasqual nearly destroyed Kearny's command. Carson slipped through enemy lines to summon reinforcements, and California was eventually conquered.

As Indian agent in New Mexico, Carson campaigned against the Jicarilla Apaches alongside Captain James Henry Carleton. The Chiricahua Apache chief Mangas Coloradas's efforts to maintain peace collapsed after the Bascom Affair of 1861. In that incident, a lieutenant's botched attempt to arrest Cochise, another Chiricahua chief, over a kidnapping he did not commit sparked a generation of war. The Civil War brought Confederate invasion of New Mexico; Carson's regiment was held in reserve at Valverde. After the rebel retreat, Carleton, now a general, ordered the subjugation of the Apaches and Navajos. Mangas Coloradas, seeking peace, was lured into a meeting, captured, tortured, and murdered by soldiers in January 1863. His death galvanized Apache resistance for a generation.

Carson reluctantly led the Navajo campaign, entering Canyon de Chelly in January 1864. Over 8,000 Navajos endured the "Long Walk" to Bosque Redondo, a reservation on the Pecos River that proved a catastrophe of starvation, disease, and suffering. Carson's last battle came at Adobe Walls in November 1864, where his outnumbered force fought thousands of Kiowa and Comanche warriors. Carson died on May 23, 1868, weeks after the death of his wife, Josefa. The following month, General William Tecumseh Sherman negotiated a treaty allowing the Navajos to return to their homeland.

The final section centers on Buffalo Bill Cody. Born in 1846, Cody worked as a teamster, Pony Express rider, and Civil War soldier before becoming a buffalo hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railway, killing over 4,000 animals in eight months. The author traces the destruction of the buffalo herds from an estimated 20 to 50 million animals to near extinction by 1884. Appointed chief of scouts for the 5th Cavalry, Cody fought in several engagements, most notably Summit Springs in 1869, where the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, an elite warrior society, were crushed.

The narrative follows Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota holy man who refused to sign treaties or submit to reservation life. After gold was discovered in the Black Hills, the government ordered all Sioux to report to agencies by January 1876. Sitting Bull's Sun Dance vision of soldiers falling into the Lakota camp was fulfilled at the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876, where Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and five companies of the 7th Cavalry were annihilated. Weeks later, at Warbonnet Creek, Cody killed the Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hair in single combat and returned east to exploit the deed onstage, creating a moment where frontier reality and theatrical performance merged.

Cody transformed the Western experience into mass entertainment. His Wild West show, launched in 1883 with partner Nate Salsbury, featured real cowboys, Indians, and historical reenactments. Sitting Bull joined for the 1885 season, forming genuine friendships with Cody and sharpshooter Annie Oakley. The 1887 London tour made Cody an international celebrity. The narrative darkens as the Ghost Dance religion, which promised the return of the buffalo and dead ancestors through ritual dancing, spread among the starving Sioux. On December 15, 1890, Indian police killed Sitting Bull at his cabin. His gray show horse, trained to perform during gunfire, began to dance amidst the carnage. Two weeks later, the 7th Cavalry killed over 150 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee.

At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Sitting Bull's gray horse led the grand parade of Cody's Wild West show, which drew over 3 million visitors. That same July, historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his thesis that American democracy emerged from the frontier experience. Together, Turner and Cody place the story of the West at the center of American identity: Turner provides the intellectual framework, Cody the popular spectacle. When Cody died on January 10, 1917, the connection between modern America and the old frontier was severed.