Description: A vivid history of American western expansion, The Health of the Country captures the excitement and romanticism of the frontier experience as well as another, lesser-known reality of settling: how terrifying the untamed wilderness of the West was to its homesteaders. In a time when good health was tantamount to perfectly balanced "humors, " settlers thought that the wild extremes of the borderlands disrupted the delicate equilibrium of their bodies. Conevery Bolton Valencius is the first historian to address how central this fear was to frontier life. Settlers' primary concern was to save themselves from the painful, fatal, or disabling ailments that are as much a part of American history as cowboys and wagon trains. This is a beautifully written, fresh account of the gritty details of American expansion, animated by the voices of the settlers themselves.

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