This is John Batchelor, a conversation with Professor Robert G. Parkinson, his new book,

Heart of American Darkness, Bewilderment and Har on the Early Frontier.

This is the 18th century settling the Ohio River Valley, pushing from Maryland into Ohio.

It's also a contest between Maryland, the state, the nascent state, and Pennsylvania.

It's also a contest between the settlers, the colonial settlers, and the Native American tribes,

who are being pushed west, always west.

The different tribes gather, and then they change directions, and then they camp.

The Ohio River Valley is their fallback.

However, there's violence in all directions.

The Seven Years' War, and the American Revolution is ahead.

In this passage, the professor analyzes the crescents. It's one of the families we follow. We follow a Native American family,

the Shikilomani, and the Kresops. And the Kresips are accustomed to violence and horror.

The early frontier was not conquest of nature.

It was conquest of humans.

Here's Robert G. Parkinson describing the Crescent family,

several generations of violence.

More of this later tonight.

Yes, well, that's what the young man, it thinks is what is being said.

We don't know that that's exactly what he said, but that's, but the fear is ever present,

that they are terrified.

And that comes at, that scene comes at the very end of Pontiac's war, which is yet another episode of conflict after the Seven Years' War and before Yellow Creek.

And in that, there is a significant fight in Old Town in which Michael Cressup kills a native person who's attacking his home at the very end of the lane of his house and scalps him and takes his moccasins. So Michael does this at 21 years old. And his older brother, Thomas Cressep Jr., was killed during the Seven Years' War in the Hills not very far away. So these are families that are

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