In this startingly original work, Robert Parkinson presents a new account of ever-shifting encounters between white colonists and Native Americans. Drawing skilfully on Joseph Conrad's famous novella, Heart of Darkness, he demonstrates that imperialism in North America was neither heroic nor a perfectly planned conquest. It was, rather, as bewildering, violent and haphazard as the European colonisation of Africa.

Bringing a Conradian lens to the central episodes of the early American frontier from the 1730s through the American Revolutionary War, Parkinson follows the intertwined histories of two prominent families, one colonial and the other Native, who helped determine the fate of the empires battling for control of the Ohio River Valley. Offers nothing less than a new story of the making of the United States, Parkinson argues that American history is, in fact, tied to the frontier, just not in the ways we are often told. Altering our understanding of the past, he also shows what this new understanding should mean for us today.