Carole Troxler

The Red Dog Carole Troxler

It is 1764 in the North Carolina Piedmont. Thirteen year-old Lizzy worries for her younger brother. They are orphans, separated by apprenticeships to different masters. In her new location, she faces hard work, a lower social status, and changes in her body that puzzle and confuse her. While she works in her master's Red Dog Tavern, she learns of grievances that will explode soon in the Regulator Movement. As a white girl, she is curious about slavery, which is not yet secure in the Piedmont. Readers will gain insights on how white supremacy increased there during Lizzy's lifetime. Lizzy bonds with ethnically diverse friends, and their help to one another brings danger. Throughout their adventures, she tries to keep herself steady and make the best of her apprenticeship by thinking about her mother's example. With memories of her mother fading, Lizzy learns to think - and feel - her own way. There are nuggets of recognition to engage twenty-first century readers and connect them with the backcountry world of Lizzy and her friends. Their stories display everyday habits, folk knowledge and stories, religious identities, and experiences with fosterage and apprenticeship. The teenagers use skills such as papermaking, guiding a pack line of horses across a stream, and using snakes to kill bad guys. Now a footloose historian as Professor Emerita at Elon University, the author continues to research and write scholarly history. The Red Dog: A Tale of the Carolina Frontier is her first work of fiction. It draws from decades of research and publication about the late eighteenth century in the southern backcountry.