15 Days in the Wilderness

Author

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville is best known for having written Democracy in America, a brilliant and prescient study of the emerging American democracy, its politics and form of government, its economics, demographics, and attitudes, in short, almost everything that could be known about this new country and the character of the new man, the “American.”

Tocqueville gained his understanding of the new country and its inhabitants through the experience of a nine-month trip to North America in 1831 when the American republic was about fifty years old. Tocqueville was just 25 when he made this trip, a fact that makes his great intellectual accomplishment, Democracy in America, all the more impressive.

Fifteen Days in the Wilderness is a journal that he kept during a two-week side trip to the Lower Michigan peninsula. It is a charming, ironic, and vivid picture of America before it was the country we know today: an America of virgin forests and of Native American culture, both at the point of being overwhelmed by the steady advance of European “civilization.”