Conrad Richter has reclaimed two segments of the American past widely separated in geography and time. Early Americana is a collection of stories about buffalo hunters, cowpunchers, and homesteaders in the region of the Staked Plains, the Llano Estacado of Southwest border history. The Sea of Grass holds within its brief framework the sweep and drama of the cow country at the end of the last century, when cattlemen fought to hold their free range against the nester's fence and plow. Tacey Cromwell has for its background the Arizona mining town of Bisbee in its roaring boom days, a contrast between the lusty, swarming life of Brewery Gulch and the prim respectability of Quality Hill. The Trees and The Fields trace the growth of a pioneer settlement in the territory west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River. In an age of period-piece fiction stuffed with names and dates, these novels have a simple human warmth and vigor because they are written in terms of their own characters and atmosphere, without reference to historical figures or events of the early eighteen hundreds, and the result is something fresh and effective in regional writing. The Free Man, however, links its plot with Concord and Bunker Hill; its background takes in a group of freedom-loving Pennsylvania Dutch settlers resisting British authority on the farming frontier beyond the Blue Mountains.
On one level these books belong to the eager nationalism of the depression thirties, when writers as divergent as Van Wyck Brooks and Kenneth Roberts tried to find in the certainties of a recovered past an answer to the problems of the present. (p. 221)
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