This collection of Heckewelder materials gathered by Paul Wallace follows America's most observant early traveler, John Heckewelder through the eastern woods as he recorded the most significant knowledge we have today on the Indian life and pioneer history of our Eastern frontier. From 1754 to 1813, Heckewelder crossed the Allegheny Mountains 30 times and his travels and adventures along the Indian trails of Pennsylvania into the "Ohio Country" are interwoven with the movements of the Moravian Indian missions. He lived among the Indians for almost sixty years, learning their language, sharing their activities, recording clearly and vividly what he saw and heard, being most at home with the Ohio Country Indians.

In these pages, you meet many legendary characters like Daniel Boone and Simon Girty and travel to the early settlements of Albany, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and westward to Vincennes and Louisville. Heckewelder was an artist, where the scenes and the people come alive. After reading this book, you shall not soon forget the "dismal music" of his horse's hooves striking bones and skulls on Braddock's lost fields, the howling of wolves at night at Edmunds's swamp, the man who was careless with a candle in the gunpowder shed, the Indian boy Tobias, reading his book by the light of the campfire, and the sheer joy of Indian captives being returned to the Wabash.

As editor, Paul Wallace had to gather together all travel journals from various repositories and translate those that were still in German as Heckewelder was a bilingual writer. Not long before Heckewelder began to write, the Indian had been uprooted from their Eastern Pennsylvania homelands and he shows them trying to reestablish themselves farther west. We may be surprised, considering this circumstance, to see how cheerful in temper and healthy in outlook most of them managed to remain. That does not mean this is a sentimental book, nor that the Indians in these pages are devoid of the picturesque. That could hardly be, with John Heckewelder writing. He was frank and he was candid and though he had deep affection for the Indians, never the less, he saw them through a white man's eyes.

The edition size is limited to 1000 numbered copies.

Hardcover, includes a 15" x 23" foldout map (front and back) of Heckewelder's travels across the Eastern Frontier.