The Honest Wilderness - Finding Daniel Boone & the Frontier Within
The Honest Wilderness follows Mike Martin’s search through Daniel Boone’s story, wild places, forgotten roads, and the questions that rise when life no longer fits who we are becoming. Part memoir, part historical journey, and part reflection on the frontier within, this is a book about wilderness, identity, resilience, and finding your way back to yourself.
“Daniel Boone’s story started as a trail through history but became a mirror for my own life. Born from a collection of more than thirty personal journal that I wrote along the journey, The Honest Wilderness grew out of a search for the frontier that became something much deeper — a journey through identity, resilience, loss, and what it means to find your way back to yourself. This book is my attempt to follow that question honestly, through wilderness, memory, history, and the frontier within.”
- Mike Martin
The Field Guide
A Frontier Manual for Exploration
A companion for walking the frontier within
The Field Guide turns the ideas behind The Honest Wilderness into something you can carry into your own life.
Built around reflection, wilderness, story, and honest self-examination, it offers prompts, practices, and trail-tested questions for readers who want to go deeper than the page. This is not about rushing toward easy answers. It is about slowing down, paying attention, and learning how the outdoors can help reveal what modern life often buries.
Part journal, part practice companion, and part invitation back to yourself, the Field Guide helps readers explore identity, resilience, loss, purpose, and the frontier within — one step, one question, and one honest reflection at a time.
What People Are Saying About the Honest Wilderness
“I would like to say the book was amazing in the way it was written. I genuinely felt parts of the writer’s journey could have been taken out pages in my own book of life. Being a single mom and the pressure, we put on ourselves to always get everything done can sometimes sink a person's mental well-being. I think i need to take a page out of Mike Martins book and walk a journey and find some time to find the frontier myself. I thought that was one of the things I took from the book. We don't necessarily have a frontier to conquer anymore, but the one called our mind is vastly uncharted territory for all of us to explore. Great job Mike on your unique take on your journey.”
— Keri M. (Early Read)
“This was an interesting take on Daniel Boone Journey and what it meant to the author to retrace those steps, and how that reframed his perspectives on his own experiences and memories. Mike Martin takes us on not a retelling of Daniel Boone’s epic legacy, but a detailed description and explanation of how venturing into the same wilderness, helped him after a total collapse in his life, on a journey back to living life again.”
— Candlelight Review (Early Reader)
“With so many turning to slow living as a practice these days, Mike Martin shows us the woodlands and forests and rivers have always provided the stillness we need to disconnect from the chaos of life and reconnect to ourselves, and our lives. You don’t have to be into the wilderness, the frontier, or even Daniel Boone to appreciate and enjoy this book, it touches on themes of mental health, perspectives, and using the world already around us to reconnect and fully live.”
— Blinda S. (Early Reader)