In Kentucky, the first frontier beyond the Appalachians, Arthur K. Moore finds a unique ground for examining some of the basic elements in America's cultural development. There the frontier mind acquired definite form, and there emerged the forces that largely shaped the American West.

Moore reveals the Kentucky frontiersman as a colorful, exciting figure about whom there gathered a golden haze of myth from which historians have never been able to free him. He finds that "noble savage" did not possess those high qualities of mind and spirit which both his contemporaries and...