SOURCE: “The Landscape of Tragedy: Crèvecoeur's ‘Susquehanna,’” in Early American Literature, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 39-63.

In the following essay, Hales discusses “Susquehanna,” a portion of which appeared in Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, and which describes the destruction of Wyoming, a community in central Pennsylvania.

The last chapters of Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer are characterized by what Moses Coit Tyler called a “note of pain” that, by Letter 12, “rises into something like a wail” (2:356). The rural bliss described in the first letters has been shattered by the violence and division of the American Revolution, and in Letter 12, “Distresses of a Frontier Man,” James explains his intention to abandon his farm and find refuge in a wilderness Indian village. This final letter offers an account of his current unhappiness and a fearful anticipation of the dangers of frontier life, the most...