The impact of the two World Wars on novelists of the last several decades has perhaps minimized the role of folklore either as central or as contributory in recent American fiction. But there is one … novelist who has employed folklore so frequently and so richly that it is surprising that no critic has previously pointed it out. I speak of Conrad Richter, the author of a trilogy of novels about the settlement of the old Northwest Territory….

Richter's fiction is not limited to this trilogy…. [In] his The Sea of Grass he achieved a memorable tale of the southwest ranching area which for sensitivity of style and subtle feeling for background rivals Willa Cather's more famous Death Comes for the Archbishop. In several of the short stories collected in the volume appropriately entitled Early Americana Richter also used various folklore themes, but such material is more apparent in the three volumes about the early Ohio Valley which so far comprise his chief artistic success, The Trees, The Fields, and The Town. (p. 6)

Many a reader accustomed to the literary conventions of historical fiction will be surprised by the speech of the Lucketts, but it is self-consistent, appropriate, and meticulously recorded….

Descriptions of cabin life resuscitate archaic words until certain passages sound like a linguistic museum. (p. 8)

The Lucketts of course use the standard illiteracies, substituting "er" for the terminal "ow" in words like window, follow, and borrow, turning "yellow" into "yaller" and "sermon" into "sarment," making "afeard" out of "afraid" and "cam" out of "calm."…

Homely idioms recur in the Luckett conversation…. A woman who speaks out of turn is ironically presented: "Idy Tull had to go and say sweet as sap that has stood too long and started to work."

Chapter epigraphs in The Town illustrate the same interest in folk speech….

The emergencies of family life far from the amenities and resources of civilization often produce odd bits of traditional lore or superstition. Particularly when immediate medical care is required do such survivals emerge from the reservoir of the past. (p. 9)

Superstitions transmitted from one generation to another sometimes affect the actions of the characters. Worth once shot an albino deer but refused to bring home the meat because he considered it tainted….

Staves of old ballads and fragments of folk songs remotely derived from the border minstrelsy of another land are heard occasionally. Song makes monotonous chores less dreary or reflects the mood of the character…. (p. 11)

Characters who can neither sing nor recite often rely on the proverb or maxim to explain conduct at critical times or to express their own thoughts more aptly. (p. 12)

In her physical and social maturity Sayward grows farther away from the primitivism of her people. Her speech changes slightly and is less colloquial and illiterate. She has little need to rely on the cures, customs, and even domestic practices derived from tradition; outwardly she conforms more and more to the amenities of a developing civilization. Proverbial wisdom comes less frequently from her lips, the superstitions of the frontier have vanished, and much of the life of the folk has been supplanted by the conventions of the town. (pp. 12-13)

Sayward's own children, nine in number, are reared in a somewhat different environment and come to their maturity in the town of Americus rather than in the backwoods hamlet of Moonshine Church. In other words, the circumstances of life for the first generation in the forests of Ohio are quite different from the social compulsions experienced by the second. It is not only that the physical dangers of Indian attacks, of wild beasts, and of imminent starvation have disappeared, but that Sayward's children are reared in a period when personal security, a certain amount of schooling, and social respectability are established commonplaces. Sayward herself may revert occasionally to the customs or speech of her youth, but her husband Portius, except for an early period as a fugitive "woodsy," has always regarded primitive life with Back Bay contempt, and the Wheeler children quickly forget their period of cabin existence.

As a consequence, Conrad Richter employs substantially less folklore in The Town than in the two preceding novels. Occasionally he utilizes the homely language, especially in describing Sayward's moods or deeds, that marks the first novels…. Similarly, the colloquialisms of Sayward's children are the everyday abbreviations and slang of town speech rather than the older idioms of the frontier folk. Proverbs and maxims appear less frequently in the conversation. Doctors with professional training have made unnecessary the old reliance on popular cures and nostrums. Catches of old songs, vulgar riddles, country superstitions, folklore references are less a part of diurnal existence. (pp. 13-14)

But if the final novel of Conrad Richter's trilogy seems little indebted to folklore, there can be no question of the special vitality which folklore gives to The Trees and The Fields. The Luckett family and, at least in their youth, the Wheeler children live much of their lives in accordance with past conventions and traditions. Their hunting activities, the preparation of their food, their remedies in case of illness, the ceremonies of birth and marriage and death, their simple religion, their response to the supernatural, their social mores, all owe much to the dictates of the folk. Conrad Richter's fiction is the richer and the more convincing because he has seen fit to incorporate such material in his dialogue, action, and characterization. And if the portrait of Sayward Luckett Wheeler is the finest portrait ever drawn in fiction of the American frontier woman, it might be contended that her excellence rests squarely on Richter's depiction of her as a woman strongly if often unconsciously influenced by racial and folk tradition. Her cultural legacy makes her what she is and demonstrates the tremendous importance of folk survivals in the frontier period. (p. 14)