
The Trees is the first book in Richter’s The Awakening Land Trilogy. So technically it is set before gardening in the lonely world of the Northwest Territory. Before settlers could even think of planting a garden they had to deal with the endless trees. This is what fifteen year old Sayward Luckett saw when her father, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, took the family west to Ohio in the last years of the eighteenth century.
“For a moment Sayward reckoned that their father had fetched them unbeknownst to the western ocean and what lay beneath was the late sun glittering on green-black water. Then she saw that what they looked down on was a dark, illimitable expanse of wilderness. It was a sea of solid treetops broken only by some gash where deep beneath the foliage an unknown stream made its way. As far as the eye could reach, this lonely forest sea rolled on and on till its faint blue billows broke against an incredibly distant horizon.”
This was the beginning of the story of The Trees. The new country had no money to pay a veteran like Worth Luckett. He was given script that could go toward land in the territory west of the Allegheny Mountains.
By the end of this volume Sayward marveled at a new sight:
“It was no ordinary day when the wild ground gave birth to its first tame crop. The wind stood off. The clouds hung like summer. The tender sky came right down in the clearing, softening everything with a veil finer than spider skeins. A little ways there in the woods, Sayward knew the air still hung chill and dim. But here in the clearing, the four sides of the forest held summer in like the banks of a pond. Flies and beetles hummed in the bright warmth. The soil breathed up a sweet rank smell of sprouting and growing. And here and yonder the first tiny green shoots of the baby corn had pushed overnight through the black ground. You could just make out the faint, mortal young rows bending around the stumps.”
By the end of The Trees, Sayward has lost her mother to illness, her littlest sister, Sulie, has disappeared without a trace in the forest, her father, with itchy feet, has taken off into the woods, another sister has run off with the husband of her third sister. Sayward doggedly keeps what’s left together. That is her young brother and her abandoned sister. The two other volumes of the trilogy, The Fields and The Town, follow Sayward into old age.
Richter has said the secret to a good story is keep your characters in trouble. He gives Sayward a wagonload of trouble and she meets it all with uncommon strength of character. In the reader she elicits nothing but admiration. Following her to the end of The Trees only spurs one on to opening the next volume. One feels compelled to witness Sayward’s journey through the rest of her pioneer life.
This is historical fiction at its best. Richter employs the dialect, views and prejudices of the time. Vicious, stomach-turning cruelty takes place among pioneers and Indians alike. Kindness and natural beauty are also part of the isolated life of the Northwest Territory.