With Into the Kentucky Woods , John van Willigen traces the process of making a life in the area now known as Kentucky from approximately 1750 to 1810. He details settlers' foodways, the physical and cultural environment they found on the frontier, and the knowledge they carried based on their ethnic and class diversity. Along with a focus on the day-to-day doings of early settlers, van Willigen highlights the lives of Native populations prior to colonial encounters to establish a context of the Kentucky wilderness and further negate any potential myths regarding this period in the Commonwealth's story. Using journals, diaries, memoirs, letters, and interview-based notes, he incorporates personal narratives of the state's residents. These records of migration, farming, gardening, food processing, and cooking lend an ethnographic quality to van Willigen's history. Through eyewitness accounts and an examination of American settler practices, Into the Kentucky Woods offers an opportunity for reconsidering everyday life on the frontier.