AETERNUS
Anthracite · The American frontier
1793–1868
Soldier, frontier judge, chronicler of the West.
On his circuit rounds through Illinois, James Hall collected the recollections of hunters, scouts, and old settlers — and gave the literature of the early West its first forums.
To the workAuthor & context
Military service gave Hall an unsentimental eye for how men behave under the worst conditions, and that eye is at work throughout his one novel.
James Hall was born in Philadelphia on August 19, 1793. In the War of 1812 he was distinguished at the battle of Lundy’s Lane and at the siege of Fort Erie, and served as a lieutenant under Colonel Winfield Scott on the Canadian frontier.
In 1815 he took part in Commodore Stephen Decatur’s operations against the Barbary corsairs in the Mediterranean.
In 1820 Hall moved to Shawneetown, Illinois, where he practiced law, edited the Illinois Gazette, served as state’s attorney, and in 1824 was appointed a circuit judge.
His rounds through a raw and thinly settled country brought him into contact with the hunters, scouts, and old settlers whose recollections of the frontier’s first generation he began to collect and publish.
The Western Souvenir (1828) was the first literary annual published west of the Allegheny Mountains; the Illinois Monthly Magazine, founded by Hall in 1830, the first literary periodical west of the Ohio.
Letters from the West (1828) and Legends of the West (1832) collected sketches and tales of the border; The Harpe’s Head (1833) was his only novel. With Thomas L. McKenney he produced the History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1838–1844). Hall died on July 5, 1868, at Loveland, near Cincinnati.
Portrait: steel engraving by J. C. Buttre after a painting by J. O. Eaton, frontispiece to The Romance of Western History, 1857.
Text: The Harpe’s Head; A Legend of Kentucky, Key & Biddle, Philadelphia, 1833.
The AETERNUS edition
The complete text of the Philadelphia first edition of 1833, checked word by word against the original page images, with a publisher’s apparatus, a frontispiece, and nine new plates. Paperback, hardcover, and Kindle editions are in preparation; ordering links will follow when available.