“We have given you a fine land, Brother, but you will find it under a cloud and a dark and bloody ground.”

When I was a little boy, my greatest hero was Davy Crockett. Still, I occasionally read a book about Daniel Boone. And in the Boone stories, I noticed they sometimes mentioned a man named Simon Kenton. Kenton was generally spoken of in the same breath with Boone, as a man greatly respected on the frontier, a skillful hunter and tracker, and a leader.

But, oddly, I never saw a story about Simon Kenton.

A couple weeks ago I caught a YouTube clip from an interview with Mel Gibson. He mentioned that he was reading a book called The Frontiersmen: A Narrative, by Allan W. Eckert, and that it was about Simon Kenton. “Ah ha!” I thought. “At last I can learn the story of this mysterious man.”

And golly – what a story it is.

Simon Kenton was born in 1755 in Virginia, the son of a poor Irish immigrant father. He was the kind of boy who skipped both farm chores and school to spend time in the woods. A tall and strong boy, he fled “to the territories” at the age of 16, believing he had beaten a romantic rival to death. To evade the law, he adopted the pseudonym “Butler,” under which he lived for many years – until he ran into someone from his home town, who informed him that not only had he not killed his opponent, but he himself was assumed dead.

Gradually his natural gifts for wilderness living made him a renowned hunter. He once rescued Daniel Boone from Indian captivity, and he was himself captured on another occasion – tortured, made to run the gauntlet several times, and finally adopted into the tribe. When he got the chance, he returned to the white settlements, where he claimed a lot of land (most of which he eventually lost) tried to run businesses (which all failed), and participated in the wars for Kentucky and Ohio – where he became a legend.

But The Frontiersmen is a plural title, and there’s a second major thread in this book. That thread follows the life of a truly remarkable man on the other side – the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. Tecumseh’s story rises to the level of true tragedy – he was, by all accounts, a man of great intelligence, decency, and leadership talent. Born into a happier situation, he might have become the founder of a nation – he came close to welding together Native American tribes from all over the continent, in an effort to drive the White Man back. It was likely a hopeless dream, but the extent of his success, even so, was astonishing.

I need to warn you that this story about the “dark and bloody ground” is indeed a dark and bloody story. Some of the cruelties described on both sides may keep you up at night (though one can’t escape the fact that it was the White Man who was the aggressor).

The Frontiersmen is written in novelistic form – the author uses imagined dialogue (always based, he says, on reliable reports – though I have trouble figuring out how he knows what a chief said to his wife in bed). The writing is generally good, not great – I caught some grammatical slips. Also there are a number of OCR misreadings in the e-book text.

Christianity is treated with great respect, which I appreciated. (Kenton, we are told, was gloriously saved in a Methodist church service as a middle-aged man.)

There’s a marvelous epic sweep to The Frontiersmen. I found it compulsive reading, and it moved me – often almost to tears. I highly recommend this book. Cautions for sexual situations and (especially) for scenes of appalling cruelty.