Wilderness Clearing

By: Walter D. Edmonds

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Synopsis: WILDERNESS CLEARING is Walter D. Edmonds’ first full-length junior novel. It is the story of a sixteen-year-old boy and girl--diffident, clumsy Dick Mount and clever, imaginative Maggie Gordon, who lived in isolated clearings, “imprisoned by the green silence of the wilderness of the Mohawk Valley.” To Maggie, Dick seemed a bit young and inarticulate, not at all romantic and heroic--though it was good to be able to depend on his unswerving loyalty. But when responsibilities came and danger threatened, with the desperate illness of Maggie’s father and the massacre of Dick’s brothers by marauding Indians, this typical young American proved that he could act with quiet courage and steadfast purpose--and assumed quite a new aspect in Maggie’s bright eyes. Here, as in all his books, Walter Edmonds has drawn upon authentic history for his background and main events, as well as for many of the characters of his stories. The Mount boys of whom he writes were killed by two Indians in the fall of 1777 for $16.00 and the copper kettle their scalps would bring that year at Fort Oswego. It was only a small episode in the opening of the Revolution in Northern New York, but it served to warn the border settlers that the Indians had been turned loose against them. After it happened, every man who heard of it knew that there would be no safety anywhere along the border settlements for anyone out of gunshot sound of the Mohawk Valley forts.