I just finished reading (re-reading, actually) three books that Conrad Richter (1890-1968) wrote as a trilogy--
The Trees,
The Fields, The Town--set from the late 18th century to the mid-19th. The story centers around one family who left their home in Pennsylvania when the game gave out and made their way into the wilderness west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River to Shawnee and Delaware land where all you could see was a sea of trees, an"ocean of leaves"--so many that the sun never seemed to shine but the game was plentiful. Here they settled, living in a cabin they built themselves, making do with only a few cooking pots, some quilts, an axe, and a rifle. They ate a lot of bear meat and venison and a bit of johnny cake and wheat bread when they could trade furs for meal.
As
The Trees (published 1940) continues, the landscape gradually changed as farmers and tradespeople appeared and began the process of not merely chopping down "the little fellows" for cabin logs but "the big butts" (trees) so that the settlers could be more than "woodsies" (itinerant hunters) and put in "potato vines, roasting ears and flax growing there in the sun." It was only then, when the never-ending woods began to be cleared, that the sun did in fact begin to shine as more and more people began shifting the landscape, including making pathways between houses so that they would not get lost going home in the dark.
In
The Fields (1946), as the story-line continues with the same family, people were "fetching labor-saving machinery into the wilderness." They built a meeting house, church, school, store, grist mill. They bought looms and raised sheep for wool. They also noticed that with the trees now cut, the game had gone, replaced by foxes, field birds, possums, mice. Now known to be part of the state of Ohio, they changed their settlement's name from Moonshine Church to something they thought more befitting--Americus. They saw even more sun as more trees fell. And many paths and fields were now free of stumps.
Finally, in
The Town (1950), in which one member of the family said their town "was getting too big for its britches," there was milling, blacksmithing, wheel-wrighting, a soap works, cotton factory, newspaper, hotel, plus societies now telling business owners what they could and couldn't do ... and various committees such as the one that approved building a new church since the steeple on their current one wasn't tall enough. Someone else wanted to dig up the graveyard and put in a bank. The bucket method of putting out fires was abandoned when they sent off for a fire engine ... which was soon replaced by an even newer variety. Houses were built on the square--later to be turned into shops. A canal was built, a rail line. Any trees to be found now had to be planted.
I first read these books for an American Lit class in college and never forgot them, finding them works of total integrity and history at its best: approachable, engaging, intimate. Conrad Richter did his research, coming up with the archaic slang and speech of that era, stories of the Revolution and the wilderness folks. He is an excellent writer--lyrical, gentle despite his description of tough subjects, and magical by letting you feel as if you were living in those very times. For me, these beautiful works are unlike anything written today about that era. (
The Town won a Pulitzer in 1951.)
The heart of the books, then, centers around these changes that take place both
to the land as well as to the people and the amelioration of their living conditions. As Richter states (and my Lit professor reiterated), hard work and
diversity from making contributions and sacrifices gave the people of that day "character." Even the youngsters then--those
who had the forests already cut for them, the houses already built for
them, the food already available for them--were thought to be getting by without having to do the work of their forebears.
There is an interesting aside to all this, however. Less than a decade after the author's death, the work was bowdlerized (that's my word, but I feel it fits). A television crew turned it into a mini-series in the 1970's, changed the story-line, the characters' actions and reactions, and incorporated social attitudes of the day to match what I might call the beginnings of this era's "political correctness." Once re-written, it was re-published as a revised edition by Ohio University Press. So, in looking for these books, be sure to ask for the
original version--that published by Alfred A. Knopf.
A last word. I find this travesty of homogenizing characters and story-line especially ironic since, no more than a few pages from the end [page 410,
The Town], in looking back on her life, the main character speaks of the joys of finding diversity in people without attempting to make everyone the same. "In her time in the woods, everybody she knew was egged on to be his own special self. He could live and think like he wanted to and no two humans you met up with were alike. ... Folks were a joy to talk to then, for all were different."
P.S. There's something about names that I find compelling. And Richter's choices for the family members seem intriguing--many of which I dare say he found in his researches. The men: Worth, Wyitt, Portius, Resolve, Guerdon, Kinzie, Chancey. The women: Jary, Sayward, Genny, Achsa, Ursula/Sulie, Huldah, Sooth, Libby, Dezia, Mercy/Massey. As unique as many of these names are, so is his writing.
