'All you need is love,' sang The Beatles. But they sang against a backdrop of militant demonstrations, the hazing of soldiers, environmental 'monkey-wrenching,' self-destructive drug trips, and a knifing death at the Altamont Rock Festival in 1969. Apart from the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society, which took Charles Manson as its hero, most people who identified with the 1960s counterculture deplored violence as much as they deplored the war in Viet Nam. Yet they were able to adapt the Boone myth to their own purposes by playing down its violence and emphasizing the first half of the regenerative cycle, the Indianizing of white pioneers. For those on the political left, as well as those on the right, the wilderness and the Indian were ideologically charged symbols (Herr 1991) (Bates 29)."

While Herr's assessment was tainted with the experience of a returning Viet Nam era war veteran, he...
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