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sabrefudge t1_itvjr6m wrote

Looking for recommendations for books giving insight into what life would be like for a family on the American frontier. Isolated life in a cabin in the woods, if such a thing occurred. What they would do to get food (hunting, growing food?), what kind of clothes they’d wear, what kind of illnesses could kill them, how the cabin would be laid out, how often passing travelers would come through and if they’d generally trade, et cetera.

Thanks!

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elmonoenano t1_itvmrwz wrote

The cabin part is real, but for the most part people weren't isolated on the frontier. There were already people there. They might have been Indians, but usually early settlers were reliant on Indians and involved to some extent in their community. There was a recent book about Daniel Boone and his time on the frontier called The Kidnapping of Jemima Boone by Matthew Pearl that might be worth checking out. There's a couple recent books, one by Cassandra Tate and one by Blaine Harden on the Whitmans. They were pretty early settlers but you'll see they were still integrated into a community of settlers. If you want to get stories about the "lone white person" in a frontier area, you can look at the fur trappers, but all of them were integrated in one way or another into the indigenous communities. Usually they took an Indian wife so they could have freedom to travel and access to hunting. Maybe check out something like Ted Morgan's Wilderness at Dawn.

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sabrefudge t1_itwxzre wrote

Great. Thanks for all this info. Trying to do some research for a project involving an isolated family in the wilderness. With little to no contact with other humans. Unsure what time period that would fit best into.

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Jaded247365 t1_iu2vxd9 wrote

A recent book that backs this up is:

Born of Lakes and Plains, by Anne F. Hyde (Norton). “A new way of looking at the American West emerges in this history of the mixing and marrying of Indigenous people and settlers. Beginning with the fur trade, Hyde shows how marriage and procreation were crucial to integrating newcomers and building alliances. Commerce relied on networks of kin, and, as Native American clans would share knowledge only with those they considered family, mixed-descent children were vital intermediaries. The stories of five families through the nineteenth century illustrate how these intermediaries were also vulnerable to racist and expansionist policies. Though some were forced to hide their heritage, Hyde highlights their acts of agency, and tells "a narrative of our past with shared blood at its heart."

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projectdavepodcaster t1_itwp37q wrote

You might like the Oregon trail by rinker buck. He traveled the trail a few years ago by wagon and talks about what life was like expanding westward

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SoxfanintheLou t1_itxpm7w wrote

Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie is a fantastic book about the early settlement of Illinois.

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greydivide t1_ityb42n wrote

Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon takes a deep dive into early settler life in a small town in Oregon after a parricide.

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Tiny-Bus-3820 t1_iu3hz9p wrote

You might enjoy Pioneer Women: Voices From the Kansas Frontier by Joanna L Stratton. The book is a compilation of autobiographical sketches by the actual women who lived on the Kansas frontier. And cover several decades of time.

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