Mapping Region in Early American Writing is a collection of essays that study how early American writers thought about the spaces around them. The contributors reconsider the various roles regions—imagined politically, economically, racially, and figuratively—played in the formation of American communities, both real and imagined. These texts vary widely: some are canonical, others archival; some literary, others scientific; some polemical, others simply documentary. As a whole, t...

The story of John Dunn Hunter's remarkable life, tragic betrayal, and disgraceful murder.John Dunn Hunter was many things: a frontier hero, a writer, a celebrity at home and abroad, and, ultimately, the victim of a deadly conspiracy. Born to white parents in 1800, he was captured as a young child by the Kickapoo and later raised by the Kansa and then the Osage. As a young man, he left his Osage family and crossed the Mississippi into the United States, where he bec...