Sixty miles from contentment

In the nineteenth century, the most interesting and exotic place on the face of the earth was the American interior - now the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Travelers came from all over the world to report on and argue about everything they found there: the frenzied eating habits, the obsession with spitting tobacco, the hunting and child-rearing customs, the region's mysterious prehistoric past, the fascinating Indian population, the disappointing tedium of the landscape, and, most bedeviling of all, the odd definition of material comfort.

Drawing on the work of more than three hundred travel writers - among them Charles Dickens, Margaret Fuller, Anthony Trollope, and Mark Twain - from America's own East Coast and from fourteen other countries, this book offers a witty and irreverent look at the wild Midwest in its heyday.