Wilderness at Dawn, Ted Morgan

I finally finished this last night, after nearly two weeks. This was part of my continuing quest to educate myself on American history; a chatty, anecdotal account of the settling of the American continent from the point of view of ordinary people, starting with the end of the last Ice Age and petering out in the early 1800's. Pilgrims and preachers; farmers and explorers; slaves and surveyors; and always the Indians -- neither glamorized nor villainized, in these accounts, and not examined in any systematic way -- mostly getting the short end of the stick.

Some of the anecdotes I recognized from other books; others, like the almost-state of Franklin, were new to me. This is, as far as I can tell, history almost without an agenda, which in some ways makes it easier to read and in others leaves it feeling a little diffuse, lacking an 'organizing principle'.

Ten things ...

I've done that you may not have.

Walked a quarter-mile by starlight in the Chilean Andes.

Sat in a butcher's freezer polishing ice crystals with a razor blade.

Ridden the same bus as David Blunkett and his guide dog, back when he was a rookie candidate for Sheffield City Council.

Visited a working face in a Yorkshire coal mine, at the age of 15.

Carried a sample of powdered ice, packed in a dewar of dry ice, from Birmingham to Didcot by train.

Travelled from Sheffield to Leicester with a three-foot Meccano model of a Bayer-Garret locomotive in a battered baby carriage.

Travelled from Birmingham to Didcot and back to pick up ten laser-printed plots for my thesis, during a postal strike.

Found my own research horribly misquoted in a book I was reading for general interest.

Stood on top of the largest solar telescope on the world. With no film in my camera.

Dipped my toes in the sea at the Cape of Good Hope.