When Elizabeth Middleton, twenty-nine years old, unmarried and fiercely independent, leaves England to join her father and brother in the remote mountain village of Paradise on the edge of the New York wilderness, she does so with a strong will and an unwavering purpose: to teach school.
It is December 1792 when she arrives in a cold climate unlike any she has ever experienced and meets a man unlike any she has ever encountered - a white man dressed like a Native American, tall and lean and unsettling in his honesty. He is Nathaniel Bonner, also known to the Mohawk people as 'Between-Two-Lives'.
Determined to provide schooling for all the village children, white, black and Native American, Elizabeth soon finds herself at odds with the slave owners, as well as her own father. Financially strapped, Judge Middleton has plans for his daughter - betrothal to local doctor Richard Todd. An alliance with Todd could save her father from ruin but would call into question the ownership of Hidden Wolf, the mountain where Nathaniel, his father, and a small group of Native Americans live and hunt.
Interweaving the fate of the Mohawk Nation with the destiny of two outsiders from different worlds, 'Into the Wilderness' is both an epic love story and a compelling portrait of an emerging America.
