Five Years in the Alleghanies — Text and Context

Violence and Conversion in the Backwoods

The excerpts reveal a pattern: the most formidable characters in Cross's account are those who have built reputations on physical strength and lawlessness. One man, known as Father B——, was a notorious bully who could whip any man in the county; he even decided the location of a courthouse by a fistfight. Yet a single tract, 'The Fool's Pence,' given to him by a judge, led to his conversion and a subsequent fifteen-year career as a successful preacher. Cross does not explain how this transformation occurred, but he presents it as a matter of record, testified to by another speaker at a meeting. The narrative thus juxtaposes raw frontier violence with the sudden, unexplained power of printed words to redirect a life.

The Sabbath Shooting Match

One of the most vivid episodes involves a colporteur who arrives in a settlement where Sunday is the day for frolicking and dissipation. Lodging with a family preparing for a shooting-match, he decides to join them rather than protest. At the gathering, he prays aloud and then preaches, and the crowd—initially confounded—listens in silence. He distributes his remaining books and tracts, and soon afterward, news spreads that people in that region are concerned about their souls. Within a short time, a preacher gathers a congregation and over twenty converts, and Sunday frolicking ceases. Cross's account here emphasizes the colporteur's willingness to meet people on their own ground, even at a gambling event, and the unexpected receptivity that follows.

A Colloquial Record of Frontier Religion

Cross's prose is direct and unadorned, often reproducing the words of the people he meets. The excerpts include a man's testimony about reading a tract on the word 'Eternity' until he had it committed to memory, then building a church on his land within six months. Another speaker recalls a judge's stern lecture to a bully, complete with the phrase 'you have become too bad a man to live.' These embedded voices give the memoir a documentary quality, as if Cross is compiling evidence rather than crafting a polished narrative. The chapter titles—'The grog-shop—The rolling mills—The Universalist,' 'The pistol—The surveyor's son'—further suggest a catalog of encounters, each one a case study in the collision of religious conviction with frontier life.

Readers approaching Five Years in the Alleghanies should expect a series of discrete episodes rather than a continuous story. Cross's method is to let the incidents speak for themselves, often without explicit moralizing. The book rewards attention to the details of setting—the isolated farms, the court-house fights, the Sabbath shooting-matches—and to the precise wording of the testimonies he records. It is a work that documents, without sentimentality, the slow and uneven spread of religious influence in a region where law and order were still being established.

I recall how Mr. Cross trudged those rough mountain trails with his little books, and I thought of Lady Fanshawe, keeping her own quiet record through upheaval and exile. Both understood that a single voice, set down patiently, can hold a world together when everything outside is chaos. There is a kinship in that—in the Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe Wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, Bt., Ambassador from Charles II to the Courts of Portugal and Madrid. — Text and Context remembering what the Alleghanies taught me.