Lost in the Backwoods: Scots and the North American Wilderness

How the American wilderness shaped Scottish experience, imagination and identity. How is the Scottish imagination shaped by its émigré experience with wilderness and the extreme? Drawing on journals, emigrant guides, memoirs, letters, poetry and fiction, this book examines patterns of survival, defeat, adaptation and response in North America's harshest landscapes. Most Scots who crossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encountered the practical, moral and cultural ch...