The first of William Gilmore Simms's Border Romance series, this is a vividly accurate and entertaining account of two very different societies in frontier Georgia during the height of the gold-rush era.

William Gilmore Simms (1807-1870), the antebellum South's foremost author and cultural critic, was the first advocate of regionalism in the creation of national literature. This collection of essays emphasizes his portrayal of America's westward migration.

"Based upon the gold rush that had taken place in northern Georgia in the early 1830s and upon the activities of the notorious Pony Club ... [that] specialized in terrorizing luckless settlers and stealing their horses"--Wimsatt, The major fiction of William Gilmore Simms, p. 123.