It is 1774 in Vermont, and Erastus dreams of becoming a Green Mountain Boy. After the death of his father, Erastus's storytelling uncle Hiram arrives to care for the family farm. Uncle Hiram shares mythical tales of the legendary Ethan Allen and the adventures of the Green Mountain boys, leading Erastus to one conclusion: he wants to belong to this elite group. Just when Erastus thinks he can't get any more inspired, he is invited to a meeting and hears Ethan Allen speak. Filled with passion and a drive he can't control, he plots to leave with his uncle Hiram and join the group. Erastus's mother knows she cannot stop him and bids him farewell for the greatest journey of his life. Narrated with the excitement and hilarity of a young man fueled with patriotism and pride, Memoir of a Green Mountain Boy follows Erastus through violent attacks, narrow escapes, and encounters with famous and infamous American revolutionaries. This personal account of Erastus's journey with a homegrown militia captures the beautiful spirit of naïve youth during an epic era in United States history-the American Revolution. For more information, go to: www.green-mountain-boy.com.
When it comes to our American heroes, it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. The bravest men and women who helped make our nation what it is today can seem larger than life. Some of the stories of their courageous acts might even sound too good to be true. Even in his own lifetime, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys became a myth, part of a folklore that people handed down. In this way they seemed almost more legend than men. In Ethan Allens case, we are lucky enough to have at least part of his story in his own words.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
The long-awaited biography of the frontier Founding Father whose heroic actions and neglected writings inspired an entire generation from Paine to Madison. On May 10, 1775, in the storm-tossed hours after midnight, Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary firebrand, was poised for attack. With only two boatloads of his scraggly band of Vermont volunteers having made it across the wind-whipped waters of Lake Champlain, he was waiting for the rest of his Green Mountain boys to arrive. But with the protective darkness quickly fading, Allen determined that he hold off no longer. While Ethan Allen, a canonical hero of the American Revolution, has always been defined by his daring, predawn attack on the British-controlled Fort Ticonderoga, Willard Sterne Randall, the author of Benedict Arnold, now challenges our conventional understanding of this largely unexamined Founding Father. Widening the scope of his inquiry beyond the Revolutionary War, Randall traces Allen’s beginning back to his modest origins in Connecticut, where he was born in 1738. Largely self-educated, emerging from a relatively impoverished background, Allen demonstrated his deeply rebellious nature early on through his attraction to Deism, his dramatic defense of smallpox vaccinations, and his early support of separation of church and state. Chronicling Allen’s upward struggle from precocious, if not unruly, adolescent to commander of the largest American paramilitary force on the eve of the Revolution, Randall unlocks a trove of new source material, particularly evident in his gripping portrait of Allen as a British prisoner-of-war. While the biography reacquaints readers with the familiar details of Allen’s life—his capture during the aborted American invasion of Canada, his philosophical works that influenced Thomas Paine, his seminal role in gaining Vermont statehood, his stirring funeral in 1789—Randall documents that so much of what we know of Allen is mere myth, historical folklore that people have handed down, as if Allen were Paul Bunyan. As Randall reveals, Ethan Allen, a so-called Robin Hood in the eyes of his dispossessed Green Mountain settlers, aggrandized, and unabashedly so, the holdings of his own family, a fact that is glossed over in previous accounts, embellishing his own best-selling prisoner-of-war narrative as well. He emerges not only as a public-spirited leader but as a self-interested individual, often no less rapacious than his archenemies, the New York land barons of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys. As John E. Ferling comments, “Randall has stripped away the myths to provide as accurate an account of Allen’s life as will ever be written.” The keen insights that he produces shed new light, not only on this most enigmatic of Founding Fathers, but on today’s descendants of the Green Mountain Boys, whose own political disenfranchisement resonates now more than ever.
The story of Ethan Allen, his encounters with the courts of New York and other British officials and the experiences of his followers called the Green Mountain boys.
Excerpt from The Green Mountain Boy: A Comedy, in Two Acts Wil., R. (aside). 80, he has heard of me, then. Yes, I am the lord of this mansion. Proceed, young man, with your business. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
