HEART OF AMERICAN DARKNESS

A scarifying, blood-soaked portrait of savagery on the early frontier—much of it committed by European settlers.

Parkinson, a historian of the American Revolution and the author of Thirteen Clocks, is a careful reader of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which, as the title suggests, he transposes to the mid-Appalachian frontier. There, Conrad’s vision of heads impaled on stakes and relentless massacres would slot in neatly as a study in terrors committed out of sheer greed. The Kurtz of the piece is a settler named Thomas Cresap, who lured a family of Mingo men, women, and children to a meadow alongside the upper reaches of the Potomac River and murdered them. Doing so made Cresap a sort of colonial folk hero, but it entangled him and his family with the families of his victims for decades and led to his being called out explicitly in a famed piece of Indigenous oratory known as “Logan’s Lament.” If Cresap, who “would later be nicknamed the Maryland Monster,” stands at the dark center of the Appalachian colonial universe, Parkinson’s story extends to include dozens of people drawn into the fight, from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to British generals Thomas Gage and Edward Braddock. The author also uncovers little-known moments in colonial history: a proto-civil war, for instance, between residents of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and a horrific episode in which Indigenous allies of the French captured one loyal to the British and “killed, boiled, and ate him.” Parkinson’s players, Native and European alike, are “bewildered,” the ground constantly shifting under their feet, alliances forming and crumbling, friends indistinguishable from foes. In the fog, other slaughters followed—and in them, intriguingly, Parkinson locates the first glimmer of the colonists’ decision to shake off British rule by force.

A superb addition to the history of the late colonial era and Revolution.