Ringold Griffitt Or The Raftsman Of The Susquehannah A Tale Of Pennsylvania

Ringold Griffitt, or The Raftsman of the Susquehannah, A Tale of Pennsylvania is a popular novel by Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809-1860), the American writer who produced more than eighty novels and stories across his prolific writing career before his death from an accidental gunshot wound in 1860.

Ingraham was one of the most commercially successful American popular fiction writers of the antebellum decades. He produced adventure novels, sea stories, historical romances, and various other works for the considerable American story-paper and cheap fiction market that developed across the 1830s and 1840s. He later turned to religious fiction, producing The Prince of the House of David in 1855 and several other biblical novels that were enormously popular in mid-century American Protestant households.

Ringold Griffitt belongs to Ingraham’s earlier adventure fiction phase. The book uses the Susquehannah River in Pennsylvania as its setting and combines the working life of the raftsmen who transported lumber down the river with the romantic and dramatic plot ingredients his readership expected.