Friedrich Gerstacker · 1844 · overland

A German of twenty-one who had read too much Fenimore Cooper went to America in 1837 to become a hunter, and spent six years doing it - mostly in the Arkansas backwoods. His mother published his letters home without telling him, so he returned to find he was already a famous writer.

1. 1
   New York

   1837, and a twenty-one-year-old German who has read too much Cooper lands in America with the intention of becoming a hunter - which almost nobody who has that intention actually manages.

2. 2
   Cincinnati

   West down the Ohio, working as a stoker, silversmith, cook and woodcutter to pay for a rifle - the practical apprenticeship that makes the rest of the book more than a fantasy.

3. 3
   The Fourche la Fave

   The Arkansas backwoods, and the heart of it: years hunting bear, deer and panther in the river bottoms, living among settlers and horse thieves and writing it all down for a German audience who devoured it.

4. 4
   Little Rock

   The territorial capital, and the regulators - the frontier vigilance committees Gerstacker observed and reported on, which is why the book is a source for historians as well as a hunting memoir.

5. 5
   New Orleans

   Down the Mississippi and out - six years in America over, and a passage home to a Germany where his mother has been publishing his letters in a magazine without telling him.

6. 6
   Leipzig

   He gets back to find himself a writer: the letters are in print, a publisher wants a book, and Wild Sports in the Far West makes him the man who taught the nineteenth-century German reading public what America looked like.