From the dust jacket:
Few novelists writing today can match Janice Holt Giles in portraying with intimate authenticity the life and outlook of the pioneer woman. Her descriptions of the Kentucky wilderness and the people who tamed it have an uncanny ring of reality. Her new novel is historical in the best sense, and gains added power from the strength of its central character.
Samuel Moore and his daughter Hannah set out for the border country with a party led by George Rogers Clark but left the others to strike out on their own. When Samuel gashed his leg with an axe and blood poisoning set in, Hannah faced the wilderness alone with a dying man. It was then that Tice Fowler, on his way to Logan's Fort, stumbled on them. After Samuel died he took Hannah back to the fort.
Women were scarce on the frontier and Hannah found herself besieged by suitors. The shy young woman, brought up by her father on a lonely farm, shrank from them and from the kindly, chattering women as well. Only with Tice, as silent and as downright as herself, did she feel at ease. At last, harried and desperate, she told him so and begged him to marry her and take her away from the crowded fort.
This is the story of the first years of their marriage: of how they built a house on Tice's land; how Hannah bore a child; and how they weathered the blizzard and the Great Cold, the attacks of hungry wolves and the Indian raid that almost ended in tragedy. Together, they discovered the joy of sharing the vicissitudes and hard-won triumphs of frontier life and through personal suffering Hannah learned to value the loyalty and kindness of the neighbors she had shunned.
Mrs. Giles knows the history of Kentucky and understands its people. She can make you feel the beauty of the land and its terror, as Hannah Fowler felt them almost two hundred years ago.
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