More than half of Maine has never been settled & lies in what is called the Unorganized Territories, millions of acres of quasi-wilderness. Add to this the thousands of farms that have grown back to woods since the Civil War, & you have the most forested state, percentage wise, in the United States. But the "uninterrupted forest" that Henry David Thoreau first saw in the 1840s was never exactly uninterrupted, for loggers had cut it severely even before the Concord iconoclast's trip, settlers had gnawed into it, & the Indians, much earlier, had left their mark. This is the story of these lands, wild then and, in many places, wild still, & the humans who used them & shaped them & fought over them. It is a story that starts in the present with the current controversies over land sales, clear-cutting & spraying, proposals for a gigantic National Park, the future of the pulp & paper & lumber industries, & no less than a secession movement in Northern Maine, & then seeks to answer the question: "How did this extraordinary region come into being?" We go deep into geologic time to understand the land & the trees that grow on it, & then hear the stories of people & events that have shaped it further: Native Americans, French, English, Puritans, settlers, loggers, speculators, great proprietors, surveyors, soldiers, squatters, industrialists, game poachers, conservationists, philosophers, artists, writers, sportsmen (and women), nature lovers, property rightists, preservationists, hermits, mystics, & picturesque characters of every stripe that have created & still create their own legends. Here is the background to see the Maine Woods--its wildlands--in perspective.