The History is in the Details
by Nan Eliot

Review of Bloody Mohawk: the French and Indian War & American Revolution on New York’s Frontier by Richard Berleth. Black Dome Press, softcover, 384 pages, illustrated, $19.95.

History has never been my strong suit. I’ve always enjoyed stories about the Hudson Valley, but the occasional foray into books on FDR and the Roosevelts has been about it. Richard Berleth’s new book, an 18th-century historical narrative dense with detail, has changed all that. Other voracious readers will undoubtedly appreciate how wonderful it is to discover a new subject or author. To be fair, Bloody Mohawk takes energy and determination for a general reader. But Berleth’s focus on the people who made the history happen makes it worth the effort.

They were a fascinating lot—British, Irish, Dutch and Palatine German settlers, the French and Native Indians—and the author makes them come alive. Their time on New York’s 18th-century frontier includes three French wars, a revolution, and the creation of a new multi-ethnic society. The diverse natural landscape and its waterways are the power driving the story.

The Mohawk created a natural gorge across the Appalachians. The Iroquois called it Tenonanatche, “river flowing through the mountains.” As Berleth tells us, “…without that gorge, Americans might well have grown up split by the Appalachian mountain range into two quite separate nations.”

In the 18th century, the river helped make the fur trade New York’s most profitable business, and to make it work, Mohawk Valley settlers and the Indians who trapped and traded had to get along. Their relationship is a major theme of the book. I was intrigued by the tribes’ political sophistication—at how they and the settlers used each other as political pawns and at how many strong friendships developed and persevered.

In a book rich with historical figures I will mention just a few. Bloody Mohawk’s narrative begins with William Johnson, a young Irishman brought to the Mohawk Valley by a wealthy uncle. A fur trader, farmer and developer who became the Crown’s supervisor of Indian Affairs, “Johnson’s genius lay in learning to listen to what the Indians wanted.” The Mohawks named him Warraghiyagey and inducted him into their tribe. William was a sensualist who loved food and drink and his two mistresses—the first possibly of Palatine German heritage and the second a Mohawk Indian, Molly Brant. He fathered ten children. Johnson, and later his son Sir John and nephew Guy, were astute farmers, businessmen and politicians intimately involved in Indian negotiations, and staunch British loyalists in the Revolution.

Molly Brant’s brother, Joseph (Thayendanegea), William’s protégé, was educated in missionary schools. He was a farmer and warrior who became the Mohawks’ war chief. He, too, was a British loyalist who fought alongside the militias. Later, Brant became incensed by the Treaty of Paris and its betrayal of the Indian nations, and led bloody raids on white settlements.

The Revolutionary hero Philip Schuyler, a brilliant strategist, was “a man who knew exactly what to do and how to go about it in the most effective way,” according to Richard Ketchum, one of the over one hundred authors whose books were researched by Berleth for Bloody Mohawk. Schuyler, too, respected and tried to help the Indians.

Berleth describes many bloody battle scenes of the French wars and of the Revolution—Crown Point, Ticonderoga, Fort George and Fort Stanwix, where Mohawk Valley legend has it that the Stars and Stripes were first flown. The Battle of Oriskany Creek marks the explosion of “sorrow on the land” in the Mohawk Valley. Cultural and ethnic differences deepened, neighbors warred against neighbors, and the Iroquois Confederation split wide open, with the tribes at war. By the end of the century, Governor Clinton had taken over a radically changed state of New York, the Indian tribes were in desperate disarray, and multi-ethnic communities had melted into each other.

This complicated history takes place on an enormous canvas. When Tryon County, where much of it took place, was created in 1772, it encompassed what are now ten of the state’s 52 counties. Bloody Mohawk’s landscapes, battle scenes, and interiors provide the background for the real-life characters it paints. This very visual narrative flows so well that, like the Mohawk River, you can almost see it.

Nan Eliot, former Director of Tourism Marketing for the I LOVE NY program, ran the Eliot Group, an international marketing service headquartered in London, for 12 years. She has written for British and American publications and ad agencies.