This powerful epic tells of the white man’s efforts to drive the Shawnee Indians from their final stronghold east of the Mississippi. Central to the story is American hero Simon Kenton, whose role rivaled that of Daniel Boone. Equally compelling is story of Tecumseh, the brilliant Shawnee chief whose intellect and charisma welded together an Indian confederacy that threatened the white man’s westward expansion. Focusing on battles in West Virginia and Ohio, The Frontiersman describes the bitterness of the Shawnee at being ousted from their lands. The Frontiersman is book one of Allan Eckert’s acclaimed six part series The Winning of America.

Against the background of such names as George Rogers Clark, Daniel Boone, Arthur St. Clair, Anthony Wayne, Simon Girty, and William Henry Harrison, Eckert has recreated the life of one of America’s most outstanding heroes, Simon Kenton. Kenton’s role in opening the Northwest Territory to settlement more than rivaled that of his friend Daniel Boone. By his eighteenth birthday, Kenton had already won frontier renown as woodsman, fighter and scout. His incredible physical strength and endurance, his great dignity and innate kindness made him the ideal prototype of the frontier hero.

The Frontiersmen is equally the story of one of history’s greatest leaders, whose misfortune was to be born to a doomed cause and a dying race. Tecumseh, the brilliant Shawnee chief, welded together by the sheer force of his intellect and charisma an incredible Indian confederacy that thrust of the white man’s westward expansion. Like Kenton, Tecumseh was the paragon of his people’s virtues, and the story of his life, in Allan Eckert’s hands, reveals most profoundly the grandeur and the tragedy of the American Indian.

No less importantly, The Frontiersmen is the story of wilderness America itself, its penetration and settlement, and it is Eckert’s particular grace to be able to evoke life and meaning from the raw facts of this story. In The Frontiersmen not only do we care about our long-forgotten fathers, we live again with them.

Researched for seven years, The Frontiersmen is the first in Mr. Eckert’s “The Winning Of America” series.

Allan Eckert is a noted historian and five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee. He also wrote scripts for the very successful television series Wild Kingdom for ten years.