This unusual short novel (159 pages) is all the journal entries from 1811-1812 of Tom Keane a white man settler in northeastern Ohio. He chronicles in brief what is going on in his community. He tells us that Ohio has been a state since 1803. That’s fine for the white people, but there are still a lot of indigenous people there, where they belong.
He makes note of his business, his trade, most of these involving things he trades the whiskey from his still for (80 proof). He also relates his sex life, when he masturbates and what he thinks about when doing so. He also uses Lattiece, a freed black woman trying to get to Canada, as a whore. She has developed a taste for whiskey and he gives her a pint now and then and “fucks” her.
He is a bit of a drunk himself. Tom is also an artist. He draws and some of his images are included in the book. Including the cover image of one of the Indians.
He is courting a widow who is twenty years younger than him.
John Chapman, now known as Johnny Appleseed is a friend of Tom’s and a member of their little community. Chapman is a quirky man who prostlitzes the work of Emanuel Swedenborg. He also is vegetarian and doesn’t drink. But many of the others do. Tom tells us about drunken militiamen who slaughter the Indians.
A war begins, The War of 1812, in which the British and the Indians are in some sort of alliance. Much of the action in the book is about the brutality on both sides. The torture and the scalpings.
The reader is left with the hardship and struggle of these new state settlers and which presents a horrifying picture of the type of people, often drunk, who killed off the indigenous “savages”, took over the land, and in a very brief time made the overpopulation country that is the USA, the horrifying global military power hungry country that it is.
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