Dogwood Crossing

About the Author Steven Frye teaches writing and American literature atCalifornia State University, Bakersfield. He has published short stories,articles, and essays in such journals as The Southern Quarterly, TheCentennial Review, The South Carolina Review, and The Kentucky Review.He has written three books of nonfiction and edited five volumes of collectedessays, which are published by Cambridge University Press and the University ofSouth Carolina Press. He works from his home in the high desert of SouthernCalifornia, where he lives with his wife Kristin and his brown Labrador Retriever,Sam. Product Description The American Frontier, 1798: Set in the remote regions of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri in the years after the Revolutionary War, Dogwood Crossing tells the story of Sam Rolens and his family, as they journey west to find land and prosperity in the French Creole Territory. At home, they were tenant farmers working for a scrap of pay. Now they travel through an exotic new world few people have seen before, stark, stunning, and incomprehensively beautiful, but full of mystery and dark possibility. Together with their uncle, the stoic frontiersman Burl, they cross Avery’s Trace and contend with the elements, attacks from the displaced natives, and the omnipresent threat of time and its passing. Upon reaching a new home in the wilds of the French Territory west of the Mississippi River, new challenges threaten the family, conflicts with each other and their different dreams, tensions with the rich mining interests that would stand in their way. It is a struggle born of hope, enacted in an implacable and violent wilderness. Review "An engaging, sometimes-chilling, and often melancholy tale of the pioneer spirit." -- Kirkus Reviews