James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the first half of the 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. Set in the seventeenth century on frontier land, The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish is a fairly realistic story of the early American wilderness experience. Captain Mark Heathcote, a widower, decides to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony and resettle in a fertile valley of the Connecticut Territory, not far from Fort Hartford. The new settlement is called Wish-Ton-Wish, a name which, the author claims, is the Indian term for whippoorwill.