The quintessential Methodist itinerant in the Trans-Appalachian West was Peter Cartwright, who began riding the circuit in the rough areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana in 1802, at the age of 17. This burly, rugged preacher was famous for his homespun sermons and for his ability to handle every situation that arose in the course of his journeys. Converted at a Kentucky camp meeting and later licensed as a Methodist exhorter, he traveled circuits for twenty-two years. As he later wrote, many of the Methodist preachers in those years could not "conjugate a verb or parse a sentence, and murdered the king's English almost every lick. But there was a Divine unction attended the word preached, and thousands fell under the mighty power of God, and thus the Methodist Episcopal Church was planted firmly in this Western wilderness." Unlike many of the early...