Wilbur Northcutt and the Boonesborough Fall - Jackie L. Smith

WILBUR NORTHCUTT KNEW EVERYTHING ABOUT FORT BOONESBOROUGH.

He'd been reading about it since fifth grade. He knew about the Great Siege of 1778, when four hundred warriors surrounded the fort for eleven days and forty settlers held them off. He knew about Daniel Boone's capture by the Shawnee, his adoption by Chief Blackfish, his escape and the desperate ride back to warn his people. He knew the names, the battles, the dates. He was fifteen years old and he knew more about the Kentucky frontier than most adults.

He just didn't know what it felt like.

On a family vacation to Fort Boonesborough State Park, Wilbur slips away from the tour group, finds a section of the old fort grounds that looks untouched, and falls - literally, through a rotted section of flooring - into 1779.

Not the reconstruction. The real fort. The one with mud on the walls and smoke in the cabins and settlers who look at his jeans and sneakers like he's from another world. Because he is.

What follows is a year inside the walls of one of the most dangerous places in early American history. Wilbur earns his place alongside BUGGER STAMPS, a plain-spoken frontier carpenter who takes him in without too many questions, and MOLLY STAMPS, whose garden and kitchen become the closest thing to home a boy from Kingsport, Tennessee, can find in 1779 Kentucky. He befriends JAMESON COOLIDGE, a fifteen-year-old hunter who becomes the kind of friend you'd take an arrow for. And he runs headlong into JASPER BARRY, a bitter, dangerous man whose grudge against the fort threatens everyone inside it.

He also lives through the hard winter of 1779-1780 - one of the coldest on record - and the Shawnee raids that followed. He loads muskets. He stands on the walls. He does things that no amount of reading about Daniel Boone could have prepared him for.

WILBUR NORTHCUTT AND THE BOONESBOROUGH FALL is a young adult historical adventure about a boy who thought he knew history and had to live it to understand it - and about the ordinary people who built something extraordinary in a wilderness that wanted to kill them.

For readers of Gary Paulsen, Joseph Bruchac, and Laura Amy Schlitz. Perfect for middle school and high school readers and anyone who has ever wondered what the frontier really felt like.