R. M. Bird's Plans for Novels of the Frontier

DR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY BIRD'S Nick of the Woods, his historical romance of early Kentucky,' was published in I837. Although Dr. Bird was but thirty-one years old at the time and had displayed great ambition as a novelist after turning from dramaL to fiction, he wrote only one novel afterward, and it was a slight performance.2 James Fenimore Cooper had published but three of his five Leather-stocking Tales; The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer were yet to come. William Gilmore Simms, born the same years as Bird, was near the beginning of his extensive series of border romances. Since Nick of the Woods has been one of the most popular of all the border tales, warranting a second edition and several dramatic versions in its author's lifetime, and since reaching a total of some thirty editions, including British, Polish, Dutch, and German, it is a matter of some speculation that Dr. Bird did not follow up his apparent success in its field. His preface to the I853 Redfield edition, which he prepared shortly before his death in 1854, states more clearly than had his first preface his intention in the book and attempts to answer certain criticisms that had greeted its appearance, but here Bird says nothing to indicate that he had originally planned the work as merely the first in an extended series of frontier novels. An examination of manuscript materials, however, shows that Nick of the Woods was but a fragment of its author's whole intention, the only finished novel of four or more projected. Dr. Bird left copious manuscript notations not only for his finished works but also for his intended ones. His grandson and namesake has placed a trunkful of his literary grandfather's manuscripts in the Library of the University of Pennsylvania. These manuscripts include extensive and interesting jottings for novels of the West. As preliminary work, Dr. Bird had written digests of such histori

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