Discovery of a well-written and researched book about your own home area is nothing less than a thrill for a person like me. Lewis Creek is the next watershed over and flows directly into Lake Champlain, draining on the west side of the 'front range' of the Green Mountains. Our town lies inside the 'front range,' a long narrow valley that feels very separate from all the surrounding towns, especially as at least half of it borders the huge National Park of the Green Mountain range and our river flows in a roundabout way, north and east into the Winooski which flows west into Lake Champlain near Burlington. At one time, as the glaciers were melting 15-12,000 years ago much of our landscape was formed when it drained directly from "Lake Winooski" through our valley, eroding a gap through the front range and flowing into the enormous "Lake Vermont". At that time our house would have been under shallow water, close to the edge of these huge bodies of melting water. When ice dams that stopped up Lake Vermont failed, all that water flowed DOWN the Hudson Valley into the Atlantic Ocean in a matter of hours, scouring out the outlines we still see along it today! Hard to wrap your mind around that! While Dann touches on these distant events, the focus of the book is on three men of the 19th century, men who worked in the natural sciences, then a new and burgeoning and controversial field. Those men are Rowland Robinson, Arthur Bulkley Perry and Cyrus Pringle. Robinson, a Quaker farmer, stayed close to his home in Ferrisburg all his life and studied Lewis Creek intently, recording, sketching and fictionalizing the land and people who lived near it. He watched, during his lifetime, the wanton destruction of habitat and decimation of almost all animal populations and was one of the early voices of the conservation movement. The only people who might have known the length of Lewis Creek better than he did were the Abenaki, and he honoured and respected them in a way that was quite unusual for that time. Cyrus Pringle is a more complex man, and ended up being a wanderer, a trusted collector of plant specimens for many museums around the country. Dann concludes gently, that he had what was an impossible secret, homosexuality, that lay at the root of a failed and vituperous marriage and his subsequent restless way of life. In any case, he was an indefatigable explorer of places both local and far away and found rare specimens, usually relicts from earlier eras, warmer and colder, of Vermont's past. John Bulkley Perry was a paleontologist and also a minister, and he strived to combine his beliefs with hard science-- never an easy task, but he could not close his eyes to the compelling case that Darwin made, so instead of debunking him, he spent his life trying to reconcile. He was instrumental, in any case, in moving the science of geological dating and categorizing forward with his controversial theories of the origin and age of the Taconic range. Dann also focuses on Lewis Creek itself and its residents and in particular, outlines a shameful episode in Vermont's history that adversely affected a few of the tiny villages in the upper reaches of the watershed. His narrative spills over the divide into the most remote part of our valley, a hamlet still called Hanksville (part of our township) and was hard to read, as I know descendants of and recognize some of the names of people mentioned. The Eugenics movement gained momentum during the teens and twenties and the legislature, with the backing of some of the professors at the University of Vermont, pushed a bill through the State House permitting the collection of data, and far worse, action--through abortion and sterilization of people they deemed to be 'sub-normal' and undesirable. This included countless Abenaki, Irish, French Canadian and Anglo hill farm families (the last of whom, admittedly, did have problems due to way too much cousinly inter-marriage). Dreadful things were done in the name of 'purifying' and 'cleansing' the 'race' of men. It wasn't science, but pseudo-science and unfortunately lasted well in to the 30's in Vermont. Many other states had similar programs and sterilized thousands of people--and it does help one understand the reluctance of the US to enter the war in Europe because Hitler was, it was rumoured, euthanizing Jews. Prejudice here ran high and deep--as they still do of course, just more stealthy and hidden, but strong as ever. Would Dann's book be of interest to you, readers who don't live where I do? Yes, indeed, if you are interested in 19th century science, natural and New England history. ***** ( )