The Forest Princess

Catalog Note *The Forest Princess; or, The Kickapoo Captives* is a frontier romance by Joseph E. Badger Jr., set during the Indian outbreak of 1812 along the Wabash River and Illinois border. The narrative follows two scouts, Uriah Barham and Pete Shafer, commissioned by General Samuel Hopkins to gather intelligence on Indian movements. Barham is motivated both by duty and by his attachment to Myra Mordaunt of Vincennes, to whom he is betrothed. The story opens with the scouts quarreling—Shafer opposing their pursuit of a mysterious female figure they've glimpsed—before they take cover to observe a party of riders approaching through a forest defile. The narrative employs period frontier dialect and conventional romance adventure tropes, interweaving military scouting operations with romantic tension between the protagonists.