James Hall, spokesman of the new West

the long version

James Hall was the foremost figure in the cultural history of the Middle Western frontier. A cultivated Philadelphian, he was at nineteen a soldier in the War of 1812 and at its close joined the expedition to the Mediterranean to fight the Algerian pirates. The years just after his return were a moment in world history when millions of fertile acres were easily available in the Middle West and the prospect of a new society there was exciting hope in cottages and drawing rooms throughout America and Europe. In 1820, Hall gave up a comfortable law practice in Pittsburgh and boarded a keelboat bound for Shawneetown, Illinois. In his adopted region he was a lawyer, circuit attorney, judge, editor and author. He rode thousands of miles on horseback through the virgin land, slept in the backwoodsmen's cabins, made their cause his, and led in the foundings of their institutions. In his writing he originated Western characters, and he gave impulse to Western myth. To him have been traced the first stories of Hugh Glass, the hunter who crawled 350 miles through hostile Indian territory after having been mauled by a bear and left for dead, and of Colonel Moredock, the Indian-hater whose story is told in two chapters of Melville's The Confidence Man. Hall was a pioneer in Western realism, and like Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, contributed a distinctive element to American literature.