I read a dry sounding title, "Narratives of Colonial America - 1704-1765" Edited by Howard H. Peckham; published in 1971 as one of "The Lakeside Classics" by R.R. Donnelly & Sons.
The little volumes were published each Christmas from 1903 until 2015?
Anyway, they are sweet little books; I've found a couple in my local library (we live in the Great Lakes region).
In 1704, Sarah Knight, a widow and business women working as a sort of financial advocate for a young woman who needed help collecting the estate of her late husband, traveled alone through the wilderness between Boston and New Haven to convince his family to part with the assets. She extended the trip to include a sojourn in New York. Then she needed to return to Boston.
All this travel was done on horse back (probably riding side saddle); she accompanied the post rider, who made trips regularly. She was terrified of water and could not swim; the post riders did not have time to coddle her as they swam their horses to cross rivers, so she was afraid and soaked to the skin (in Autumn) frequently. The inns were most often horrible with bad food she could not eat; on occasion, strange men were bedded in her room!! The round trip lasted 5 months (she stayed in comfort with relatives much of the time). She accomplished her mission.
About 50 years later, Major Robert Rogers, (a tall, young, capable officer in the French and Indian War rather than the fiend portrayed in the AMC Series "Turn") journaled about a stealth attack he arranged with his Queen's Rangers troop of about 100 men on a Tribal village in retaliation for their savage treatment of English captives and for generally supporting the French. It was a long trek to the village and a longer route back. A serious logistic failure by another officer nearly got them all killed.
6 other interesting memoirs accompanied the ones mentioned above. The book made me feel as if these 8 people, gone for hundreds of years, were each writing me a letter about their experiences.
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