One of the things I'm most impressed by is the period feel of this book. The nature of the narrative comes from a different age, one where speech is heavily influenced by the rhythms of the King James Bible and the mode of argumentation demonstrates a vocabulary that since been leached away by usage.
There is no nostalgia and no anachronisms and no sense of seeing anything other than the things that would have been seen by the people of the time.
The stress on negotiation and setting terms and laying claims show how that world could be built or broken by whether or not contracts were respected.
It also pleases me that the 'Indians' haven't been whitewashed from this account or turned into fictions from Wild Bill's show.
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