Contents -- Illustrations -- Preface -- Notes -- Chronology -- Introduction: Closing the Wilderness, Opening the Frontier -- Meliorem Lapsa Locavit -- Ideas of Nature -- Notes -- Part I. The Western Text -- 1. The Imagined West: Lewis Evans -- A Path Taken Together: Lewis Evans and the Iroquois -- Lewis Evans and the Imagined West -- Thomas Pownall: Revising the Imagined West -- Conclusion: Natives, Nature, and Imperial Geography -- Notes -- 2. The Contested West: John Wilson's Kentucke -- Nature, Nation, and Natural History -- Daniel Boone and the Captive Environment -- Conclusion: ''Avail Yourselves of the Benefits of Nature'' -- Notes -- Part II. Improvement -- 3. Textual Boundaries, Discursive Control: Stories of the Land in the Susquehanna Valley -- ''Mammy Where Are We Going?'': The Limits of Frontier Prose in ''Susquehannah'' -- The ''Wyomen'' of Treaty Literature -- Notes -- 4. Jefferson's Nature and the Trans-Appalachian West: Notes on the State of Virginia -- Ideological Geography and the Disappearing West -- Jefferson, Logan, and the Vanishing Native -- Conclusion: ''Wherefore the Forgery?'' -- Notes -- Part III. Protégés -- 5. Collaboration, Incorporation, and Environmental Discourse: Lewis and Clark, Jane Colden -- Was That a Hoh-host or a Yâck-kâh? -- Fractures in an Imperial Narrative -- Collaboration, Incorporation, Triangulation -- Jane Colden and the Charleston Network -- Alexander Garden's Trip to the Cherokee Mountains -- Notes -- 6. On the Borders of a New World: William Bartram's Travels -- Four Ways of Looking at a Sinkhole: The Construction of a Literary Natural History -- Transformations, Personal and Political -- Four Views of the Alachua Savanna: The Ideological Work of Travels -- Notes -- Part IV. Settlement & Appropriation -- 7. Reversing the Revolution through Nature: Anne Grant, Timothy Dwight.

Anne Grant's Colonial Ecology -- Marking Change, Registering Loss: Timothy Dwight's Travels -- The Roots of a Pastoral -- Notes -- 8. Disappearance and Romance: Cooper's The Pioneers -- Nature, Nostalgia, and Native Americans -- Romancing the Contact Zone -- ''This, Then, Is Thy Indian Blood?'': Becoming Native to Place -- Nostalgia, Guilt, and Nation Building -- Notes -- Coda: Parallel Republics -- Notes -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A-C -- D-F -- G-L -- M-P -- R-Y.