[Review of] Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups. The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation

• Main Author: Fleck, Richard F.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: VCU Scholars Compass 1990
• Subjects: book review; Race and Ethnicity; Pacific; karelia*; karelian
• Online Access: https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/ess/vol10/iss1/17; https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1484&context=ess

Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups have produced a new study which is revealing, thorough, and extremely well documented with ample illustrations, charts, and maps. Their thesis is fascinating: Finnish immigrants played a highly significant role in the shaping of the American backwoods frontier. The authors trace the origin of the Finns from Finland's interior where winters were (are) severe and where chinked log cabins and double-pen cabins became an art along with hunting, gathering, and marginal crop growing. Such a life style prepared them for immigration from Savo-Karelian Finland to the lower Delaware Valley settlements in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (during the 1740s) and from there westward through the Appalachians to the prairies, Rockies, and Pacific Northwest.