Most are dry accounts of relatively ordinary encounters between settlers and wildlife. Page after page of this stuff certainly makes an impression, but it also dulls the senses and reduces the impact of the more enlightening passages. Fleharty takes an archivist's approach to what he includes from each source. He demonstrates little ability to separate the significant elements from what would be better left out. He seems to feel it necessary to quote many items in their entirety.
Excerpts sometimes drag on for five or six pages.
This approach is most aggravating in the section on early legislative efforts to protect particular species. Fleharty feels compelled to reprint each new statute in its entirety and to include even the administrative details of the laws, which have no relevance to the purpose of the book. Much of the quoted material could have been boiled down to a sentence or two that would have been more effective in a standard narrative format. He examined 30 newspapers from the period studied. Yet only five collections of diaries or letters are listed in the bibliography.