Book Review "Overmountain Men"

by Cameron Judd

November 2007

• Type: Historical Fiction
• Author: Cameron Judd
• Published: Cumberland House 1991
• Subject: Novel during the time of the Watauga Association, The Transylvania Purchase and the Revolutionary War. Includes actual historical people such as John Sevier, Isaac Shelby, Daniel Boone and Nancy Ward..
• About the Author: From the back cover: "Cameron Judd is a prolific author of historical fiction who writes with authority and respect for the American frontier and the people who courageously settled the land. He is the author of Passage to Natchez, Boone, Crockett of Tennessee, and the Mountain War Trilogy of the Civil War, The Canebrake Men and The Border Men...Judd is Director of Communications at Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tennessee."

This book is the first in Judd's Tennessee Frontier Trilogy and takes place from 1757 to 1777. After surviving the siege of a fort on the Tennessee frontier where he has been taken to live, young Joshua Colter is raised by a"long hunter", Alphus Colter in North Carolina. Years later they return to Tennessee and encounter many of the Cherokees and frontiersmen who are now divided between loyalty to the British and independence for America.

"As a native Tennessean who is proud of his home region, I hope that The Overmountain Men will help spur interest in an area that is to little known by many Americans and under-exploited by writers of both history and historical fiction. Tennessee's frontier days gave a foretaste of the subsequent frontier history of our entire nation. The drama and violence of Fort Loudoun, the early infiltrations of the traders and hunters, the continual migration westward, the individualism and sense of self-reliance exemplified in the Watauga Association, the determined and often ruthless wresting of the land itself from its native inhabitants - all these things and others anticipated the flow of our nation's settlement and development for more than a century thereafter. "
     ~ Cameron Judd page 407 Overmountain Men

Judd's book is gives a great foundation for further reading about the 1770s on the Tennessee frontier..

Other recommended books by Cameron Judd in The WataugaLakeMagazine bookstore :

"The Border Men" "The Canebrake Men" "The Bridge Burners"
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