Daniel Boone was eighteenth-century America's backwoodsman. Happiest when tracking game, living off the land, and enjoying the crude shelter of the Kentucky forest, Boone spent much of his life in or near Indian country, and the proximity rubbed off; he lived in a borderland, a place where Indian and European cultures collided - yet, also surprisingly, coincided.

But this mixed world did not last, thanks in part to Henry Clay, the next-generation Kentuckian who, by the early nineteenth century, had emerged as the new republic's foremost spokesman for commercial and industrial development.

How the West Was Lost tracks the overlapping conquest, colonization, and consolidation of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Not a story of paradise lost, this is a book about possibilities lost. It focuses on the common ground between Indians and backcountry settlers which was not found, the frontier customs that were perpetuated, the lands that were not distributed equally, the slaves who were not emancipated, the agrarian democracy that was not achieved, the millennium that did not arrive.

Seeking to explain why these possibilities were not realized, Stephen Aron shows us what did happen in Kentucky's passage from Daniel Boone's world to Henry Clay's. He explores who got what and how. In tune with recent work in social history, ethnohistory, and environmental history, How the West Was Lost gives us a fresh perspective on a seminal chapter in the history of the American frontier.