A Buzzel about Kantuck

The first of three chapters exploring the history of homesteading in the area around Berea, Kentucky, chapter 2 gives a lively overview of the initial wave of white colonization and Native American displacement in the late 1700s. Because the Wilderness Road and Boonesborough are both within the research area, the life of Daniel Boone is used to illustrate the ways in which--although the labor of colonization was performed by working-class and enslaved people--the project of colonization was controlled by elites, and the land engrossed into vast estates. Despite popular images of this first United States frontier as a space of smallholder independence, the society that was created was aristocratic and defined by exploitation, a theme carried forward through the rest of the book.