Lucy Carnegie, wife of industrialist Thomas Carnegie, dreamed of creating on Cumberland Island a home where her children would be safe from the smoke and soot-filled skies over Pittsburgh. Protected by the waters of the Cumberland Sound, the estate she built encompassed nearly the entire island. It was a perfect world, until the outside world intruded. Stone by stone it all came tumbling down. Wild horses now crop the grass around the burnt-out mansion. Rattlesnakes nest among the ruins. A century later, another family comes to Cumberland to walk among the horses and to accept what gifts the island has to offer: solitude, unspoiled wilderness, and wildlife free to roam undisturbed. Returning year after year, Rhamy and her parents explore the island and swim in the ocean. They picnic on the beach where servants once served champagne, shrimp cocktails, and crab cakes to the Carnegie family and their guests. They gaze at the chimneys surrounding Stafford house, all that remain of slave quarters that once housed plantation field hands. They mourn for Zabette, daughter of a plantation owner and his black servant, sold to a man who fathered her six children, then abandoned her. Always, everywhere on the island, the horses graze nearby, unaware of efforts by environmentalists to remove them from the island where they have lived for centuries. Traveling to the north end of the island, the family sits for a quiet moment in the church where JFK Jr. married Carolyn Bessette. Across the pasture is the shack where naturalist Carol Ruckdeschel has lived for fifty years and the porch where her lover lay dead, shot through the heart. In the campgrounds, on the beach, at the Dungeness dock, wild horses graze. For now, they are safe.

The inspiring biography of the adventuresome naturalist Carol Ruckdeschel and her crusade to save her island home from environmental disaster. In a “moving homage . . . that artfully articulates the ferocities of nature and humanity,” biographer Will Harlan captures the larger-than-life story of biologist, naturalist, and ecological activist Carol Ruckdeschel, known to many as the wildest woman in America. She wrestles alligators, eats roadkill, rides horses bareback, and lives in a ramshackle cabin that she built by hand in an island wilderness. A combination of Henry David Thoreau and Jane Goodall, Carol is a self-taught scientist who has become a tireless defender of sea turtles on Cumberland Island, a national park off the coast of Georgia (Kirkus Reviews). Cumberland, the country’s largest and most biologically diverse barrier island, is celebrated for its windswept dunes and feral horses. Steel magnate Thomas Carnegie once owned much of the island, and in recent years, Carnegie heirs and the National Park Service have clashed with Carol over the island’s future. What happens when a dirt-poor naturalist with only a high school diploma becomes an outspoken advocate on a celebrated but divisive island? Untamed is the story of an American original who fights for what she believes in, no matter the cost, “an environmental classic that belongs on the shelf alongside Carson, Leopold, Muir, and Thoreau” (Thomas Rain Crowe, author of Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods). “Vivid. . . . Ms. Ruckdeschel’s biography, and the way this wandering soul came to settle for so many decades on Cumberland Island, is big enough on its own, but Mr. Harlan hints at bigger questions.” —The Wall Street Journal “Wild country produces wild people, who sometimes are just what’s needed to keep that wild cycle going. This is a memorable portrait.” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature “Deliciously engrossing. . . . Readers are in for a wild ride.” —The Citizen-Times

"A horse scheduled to be euthanized is given a respite. An illiterate man learns to read so he can better care for his puppy. A neurologically-impaired kitten might provide a key to understanding storage diseases in humans. These are some of the successes that make the practice of veterinary medicine a joy, and sometimes a heartbreak. For Kylie Wheeler, they are why she's chosen a career in veterinary medicine, and why she struggles every day of her professional life."--Back cover.

Trade paperback edition includes a reader's guide.

Cumberland Gold-white sand, green water-what not to like about this island? Why are people attracted to some islands and not others? Wilder knew he was hooked like a speckled trout the first time he took his new twenty-four-foot Sea Pro boat into Christmas Creek located on Cumberland Island's north end. He had just passed a lighthouse on the high sand dunes and realized not many people even knew it existed on this Georgia Island. He had learned some history of the island, revealing it had been designated a national seashore to "preserve the scenic, scientific, and historical character of the island." He remembered the lesson Captain Bo Sam had taught him as to how Christmas Creek got its name. Indians who lived there centuries ago reported you always received gifts there-fish, oysters, clams, crabs-all while watching wild horses frolic down the beach. Wilder also learned about the gold hidden on the island, but finding it would become quite an adventure for him and a couple of friends. Let's all climb aboard his boat and begin to understand why the earth is three-fourths water and one-fourth land. Can you guess why?

Cumberland Island is a national treasure. The largest of the Sea Islands along the Georgia coast, it is a history-filled place of astounding natural beauty. With a thoroughness unmatched by any previous account, Cumberland Island: A History chronicles five centuries of change to the landscape and its people from the days of the first Native Americans through the late-twentieth-century struggles between developers and conservationists. Author Mary Bullard, widely regarded as the person most knowledgeable about Cumberland Island, is a descendant of the Carnegie family, Cumberland's last owners before it was acquired by the federal government in 1972 and designated a National Seashore. Bullard's discussion of the Carnegie era on Cumberland is notable for its intimate glimpse into how the family's feelings toward the island bore upon Cumberland's destiny. Bullard draws on more than twenty years of research and travels about the island to describe how water, wind, and the cycles of nature continue to shape it and also how humans have imprinted themselves on the face of Cumberland across time--from the Timuca, Guale, and Mocamo Indians to the subsequent appearances of Spanish, French, African, British, and American inhabitants. The result is an engaging narrative in which discussions about tidal marshes, sea turtles, and wild horses are mixed with accounts of how the island functioned as a center for indigo, rice, cotton, fishing, and timber. Even frequent visitors and former residents will learn something new from Bullard's account of Cumberland Island.