The First Frontier
The First Frontier

Author: Scott Weidensaul

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2012-02-08

Total Pages: 637

ISBN-13: 0547539568

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“Excitement abounds in Scott Weidensaul’s detailed history of the first clashes between European settlers and Native Americans on the East Coast.”—Nancy Marie Brown, author of The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier—the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans. Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground—when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land. The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories—like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America’s tumultuous, uncertain beginnings. “Exciting and revealing . . . a stirring panorama of the land and the peoples who made their mark on it from the late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries . . . This is a rich tableau that both excites and informs about the forging of early American society.”—Booklist “Weidensaul’s delightful storytelling brings to life the terrors and hopes of the earliest days of America.”—Publishers Weekly

Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire
Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire

Author: Timothy J. Shannon

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780801488184

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On the eve of the Seven Years' War in North America, the British crown convened the Albany Congress, an Anglo-Iroquois treaty conference, in response to a crisis that threatened imperial expansion. British authorities hoped to address the impending collapse of Indian trade and diplomacy in the northern colonies, a problem exacerbated by uncooperative, resistant colonial governments. In the first book on the subject in more than forty-five years, Timothy J. Shannon definitively rewrites the historical record on the Albany Congress. Challenging the received wisdom that has equated the Congress and the plan of colonial union it produced with the origins of American independence, Shannon demonstrates conclusively the Congress's importance in the wider context of Britain's eighteenth-century Atlantic empire. In the process, the author poses a formidable challenge to the Iroquois Influence Thesis. The Six Nations, he writes, had nothing to do with the drafting of the Albany Plan, which borrowed its model of constitutional union not from the Iroquois but from the colonial delegates' British cousins. Far from serving as a dress rehearsal for the Constitutional Convention, the Albany Congress marked, for colonists and Iroquois alike, a passage from an independent, commercial pattern of intercultural relations to a hierarchical, bureaucratic imperialism wielded by a distant authority.

The Two Hendricks
The Two Hendricks

Author: Eric Hinderaker

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-09-30

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0674061942

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In September 1755, the most famous Indian in the worldÑa Mohawk leader known in English as King HendrickÑdied in the Battle of Lake George. He was fighting the French in defense of British claims to North America, and his death marked the end of an era in AngloÐIroquois relations. He was not the first Mohawk of that name to attract international attention. Half a century earlier, another Hendrick worked with powerful leaders in the frontier town of Albany. He cemented his transatlantic fame when he traveled to London as one of the Òfour Indian kings.Ó Until recently the two Hendricks were thought to be the same person. Eric Hinderaker sets the record straight, reconstructing the lives of these two men in a compelling narrative that reveals the complexities of the AngloÐIroquois alliance, a cornerstone of BritainÕs imperial vision. The two Hendricks became famous because, as Mohawks, they were members of the Iroquois confederacy and colonial leaders believed the Iroquois held the balance of power in the Northeast. As warriors, the two Hendricks aided Britain against the French; as Christians, they adopted the trappings of civility; as sachems, they stressed cooperation rather than bloody confrontation with New York and Great Britain. Yet the alliance was never more than a mixed blessing for the two Hendricks and the Iroquois. Hinderaker offers a poignant personal story that restores the lost individuality of the two Hendricks while illuminating the tumultuous imperial struggle for North America.

Diplomacy and Indian Gifts
Diplomacy and Indian Gifts

Author: Wilbur R. Jacobs

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2019-07-23

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1789126754

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This study of gifts to the Indians is an attempt to illuminate a hitherto almost obscure factor in the Colonial westward movement. These “presents,” comprising such eighteenth-century items as fabrics, hardware, munitions, food, toys, jewelry, clothing, wampum, and liquors, were a potent factor in the complex diplomatic history of Indian politics along the old Northwest frontier. Thousands of pounds sterling were expended both by the French and by the English in observing this old Indian custom that was so necessary to Indian diplomacy. Indeed, the civilizing influence of this concomitant of Western culture reached ahead of the fur trade far into the wilderness to the Mississippi Valley. These so-called presents also served as a measure of compensation for the vast areas of virgin forest that were bought by the English. The French competed with the British in securing the friendship of the powerful Indian confederacies, which, even as late as 1750, held the balance of power in North America. During the years 1748-1763, it became the policy of the colonies bordering the Ohio and Northwest frontiers to “brighten the chain of friendship” by giving presents to such influential “nations” as the members of the Iroquoian confederacy. Moreover, in some cases the Indians became so accustomed to these frequent outlays of free merchandise that they came to be almost completely dependent upon European goods.—Wilbur R. Jacobs

George Mercer Papers
George Mercer Papers

Author: Lois Mulkearn

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2010-11-23

Total Pages: 786

ISBN-13: 082297536X

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George Mercer was a lieutenant and later captain of the First Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War, and a land surveyor. He served as agent for the Ohio Company in England. In this book, Lois Mulkearn interprets George Mercer's documents on the activities of the Ohio Company.Through the eyes of Indians, French, and English we see the political and military efforts to control the vast area of the Ohio frontier, and witness treaties signed at Logstown, and those between Pennsylvania and the Weas and Piankashaws in 1740. Among Mercer's other papers are directions for laying out the first British town to be called "Saltsburg" at present day McKees Rocks, outside Pittsburgh. With this extensive collection, Mulkearn enlightens our knowledge of colonial history and the western frontier.