As Jean Barman has noted, this interest in both physical and metaphorical frontiers shaped the way Skinner envisioned the past: Skinner reified the past lives of others using her own life as a model. She had journeyed from a fur trading outpost to one of the largest cities in the world in three decades. Her own life's story, it seemed to her, mirrored much of North American history.7        7
      Both works surpassed expectations. Glasgow called Pioneers of the Old Southwest a book "so good that it seems like an impertinence to praise it." Many inside and outside the history profession considered Pioneers the best new work on the late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century trans-Appalachian South. At first glance, the reasons for her success appear simple and straightforward: She had a knack for writing, a passionate love of the fur trading frontier, and a clairvoyant tone warmed by a sense of place. A passage about Major Patrick Ferguson in Pioneers of the Old Southwest illustrates this point nicely:


Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which grew among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest legends about his ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a habit he had of pouncing on his foes in the middle of the night and pulling them of out bed to give fight or die. It was generally both fight and die, for these dark adventures of his were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no neutrals or conscientious objectors; any man who would not carry arms for the King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeiting ... Hence his wolfish fame. 'Werewolf' would have been a fit name for him for, though he was a wolf at night, in the daylight he was a man and, as we have seen, a chivalrous one.