Lost in the Backwoods examines the impact of wild country and extreme conditions on the experience, imagination and identity of Scots who settled, explored, exploited and visited North America. Through a focus on Scottish experience, the book illuminates responses to extreme environments as well as extending an understanding of Scottish and British imperial history. Drawing on journals, emigrant guides, memoirs, letters, poetry and fiction, Lost in the Backwoods examines patterns of survival, defeat, adaptation and response in North America’s harshest landscapes. Most Scots who crossed the Atl ... More

Lost in the Backwoods examines the impact of wild country and extreme conditions on the experience, imagination and identity of Scots who settled, explored, exploited and visited North America. Through a focus on Scottish experience, the book illuminates responses to extreme environments as well as extending an understanding of Scottish and British imperial history. Drawing on journals, emigrant guides, memoirs, letters, poetry and fiction, Lost in the Backwoods 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 wilderness, often exchanging one demanding terrain for another. The book begins by looking at the way Scotland itself was perceived and described by eighteenth and nineteenth century travellers, before highlighting the practical, moral and cultural challenges of the transatlantic wilderness. It argues that the many tensions and contradictions of wilderness experience profoundly imprinted the Scottish diaspora. It explores the influence of this experience on the imagination and the identities of exile as well as its practical demands. Wilderness was hostile, yet invited intrusion, barren yet potentially fertile. Associated with displacement and disappearance, it was also a source of adventure and redemption. It was the territory of exploitation and spiritual regeneration, of both freedom and restriction. The arena of greed, cruelty and cannibalism, of courage, generosity and mutual understanding, it brought out the best and the worst of humanity.