Joan G. (despinne) reviewed Simon Kenton on 6/25/2009 + 59 more book reviews

I read this book after the ones Allan Eckert wrote about New York and William Johnson (Wilderness Empire, Gateway to Empire, etc.). However, this one seems most interesting because it takes place on the Ohio-Kentucky-Pennsylvania frontier, where, over the course of the lifetime of Simon Kenton, Western Virginia--including parts of what is now Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee -- was settled by pioneers, people just like you and me. Despite the hard work and trials and attacks by indians, the settlers carved out places in the woods and built cities, towns, homes, farms, and raised families.

Not only that, but several in my own family moved from Grantsville, Md., to Akron, Ohio, and other towns in the early 1940s or late 1930s to work in the tire factories and other automotive plants, in the very places where hard-won battles were fought over the land by the early pioneers and the Shawnees. Grantsville is still a small town--the kind you can throw a rock through--on both sides of the National Road (Rt 40). It was settled by former soldiers given land there as payment for their service after the Revolutionary War, plots with names like "Bumblebee Road," "Cornucopia," and "Bill Beitzel Road." The land was good, but Kentucky and Ohio were better--unlike the mountains, there were no rocks and the land was flat. History resounded on Negro Mountain, where George Washington and his men hid a grievously wounded Negro soldier under a huge rock so the indians would not find him and torture him, then fled for their lives, never to return. I looked for that rock--I donno where it was, but I was on a farm on the side of the mountain. There were a lot of big rocks there.

Frontiersman will take you back to these lands before they began to make history, before there was a United States of America. And Simon Kenton, the hero, led the way. He brought settlers to the trans-Allegheny West, helped them find and mark out and build homes and farms. He hunted and fed them. He could RUN to visit Dan'l Boone in Kaintuck in a couple of days--it would take us a full day in a car! Those heros were spectacular, worth the tales still told about them.

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