Original Death (52 page)

“The war,” he said, his voice cracking. “The hostile tribes. The winter. The Mississippi.” There were so many hardships, so many dangers. “I may never see him again.”

“He had to do it, Duncan. He needs the time with the boy. The boy needs the time with him. The last two Nipmucs.” She looked over his shoulder, and he turned. On the piece of slate on the wall, Ishmael had written a verse.
We know what we are
, it said,
but know not what we may be
. On the way to Albany Woolford had taught the boy Shakespeare.

“There was one more thing, Duncan,” Sarah continued. “As he left, Conawago said Hetty could manage the household.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Conawago said I must give you this. He said to apologize to you for holding them back from the river.” She stood and upended a pouch of heavy coins on the table. “Eight pounds exactly.”

“Eight pounds,” he said absently, then he hesitated and picked up a coin. A smile slowly broke through his melancholy. Conawago was still looking after Duncan. “Hetty can manage the household,” he repeated.

Sarah did not understand, but she returned his smile.

“There are some Nipmuc travel songs I shall teach you,” Duncan said as he rose.

Her smile grew wider.

“You and I are going to Nazareth, in Pennsylvania,” he explained, and he took Sarah's hand. “There was another warrior who was a hero in the spirit war. We are going to buy a farm for his widow.”

Timeline

1400s (estimated).
The Iroquois League is established as confederation of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes (later joined by Tuscarora), with an organized system of leaders adhering to principles of governance designed to control intertribal warfare. At its peak the Iroquois League exercised power over tribes from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

1664.
The Iroquois League formally recognizes the Covenant Chain that binds it in a political and economic alliance with Great Britain.

1739.
Mutiny by 43
^rd
Highland Regiment, the first of several mutinies against English officers by Highland troops.

1742.
William Johnson, Irish trader based on the Mohawk River, is honored for his embrace of tribal ways by being formally adopted as a chieftain of the Mohawk tribe.

1746, April.
At Culloden Moor near Inverness, the Scottish Jacobite rebels, including many Highland clans, are defeated by British forces,
breaking the rebel army and forcing the Jacobite leader, Bonnie Prince Charlie, to flee into exile. In the aftermath of Culloden, the British send punitive expeditions into the Highlands, destroying many traditional Highland clan communities. These campaigns, and the concurrent Act of Proscription, which outlawed the bearing of arms and even the wearing of Highland kilts, effectively ended the traditional Highland life for many clans.

August.
The Iroquois League abandons its longtime neutrality in the ongoing struggles between Britain and France and under the leadership of William Johnson begins organized resistance in French Canada.

1754, July.
At Fort Necessity, an overwhelming force of French soldiers and Indian allies attacks Virginian troops under George Washington, who is forced to surrender the fort and leave the Ohio country. The defeat galvanizes the British government, which begins deploying regular army troops along the western frontier.

              
At Albany, colonial delegates meet in the first effort to join the American colonies. Benjamin Franklin, pleading “Join, or Die,” invokes the structure of the Iroquois League in promoting his Albany Plan for union.

1755, April.
William Johnson is appointed as Superintendent of Indian Affairs and also given command of colonial troops.

July.
Along the Monongahela in western Pennsylvania, the British army, under General Braddock, is defeated by combined French and Indian forces. Of the front column of twelve hundred men, a thousand are casualties. This defeat, in which Braddock was killed, painfully demonstrates that rigid European military tactics will not succeed against the wilderness style of combat, resulting in new emphasis on irregular ranger forces and light infantry.

September.
William Johnson leads a mixed force of colonial soldiers and Mohawks in defeating French forces at the southern end of Lake George. Iroquois chief King Hendrick (Teyonhenkwen), once feted in London, dies at the age of eighty while leading an attack against French.

1756, May.
War is formally declared between England and France as hostilities expand into what becomes the first global conflict.

1757, January.
New Scottish regiments (Montgomery's 77
^th
Foot and Fraser's 78
^th
Foot) are organized in the Highlands and arrive in America later in the year.

August.
General Montcalm attacks and captures Fort William Henry at the southern end of Lake George. After the surrender of the British forces, French Indians, defying Montcalm's orders, massacre retreating British troops and civilians. This battle and the ensuing massacre were immortalized in Cooper's
The Last of the Mohicans
.

1758, May.
British forces under General Forbes set out from Philadelphia to attack Fort Duquesne, constructing the first east–west road across the Pennsylvania mountains and thereby opening the region to rapid settlement.

July.
A vastly superior British force under General Abercromby attacks the French under Montcalm at Fort Ticonderoga. After a series of costly mistakes, including ordering Highland troops to charge heavily manned entrenchments without artillery support, Abercromby withdraws with severe British losses.

August.
After a monthlong siege, British forces capture the French port of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, the strongest fortress in
North America. In retaliation for the massacre at Fort William Henry, the British expel eight thousand French colonists from Cape Breton.

1759, July.
General Amherst, new British commander, captures Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point on Lake Champlain.

September.
After a bloody three-month campaign, British forces capture Quebec. In final battle on the Plains of Abraham, both the French and British commanding generals, Montcalm and Wolfe, are killed.

1760, April.
After enduring a winter-long siege in Quebec, British forces are attacked by the French and win a second battle on the Plains of Abraham.

July–September.
British troops move up Lake Champlain and up the Saint Lawrence from Nova Scotia while thousands more move northward from Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario to converge on the last French stronghold at Montreal. After negotiations with William Johnson, the Caughnawags (or Northern Mohawks), France's most formidable native allies, withdraw from the field. The French surrender Montreal, giving Great Britain effective control of North America east of the Mississippi.

1761.
In the aftermath of the British victory, General Amherst dramatically changes British relations with the tribes, cutting off the support that had sustained many natives for decades and fomenting unrest along the frontier.

1762.
Tension between the tribes and settlers erupts into a tribal uprising, led by Chief Pontiac and driven by the anti-European teachings of the Delaware Neolin, known as the Prophet. General
Amherst orders distribution of smallpox-infected blankets to tribes on the Ohio.

1763.
Campbell's Highland regiment mutinies over arrears in pay.

1764.
William Johnson negotiates peace with the western tribes after Amherst is recalled to London.

1765.
The Stamp Act is imposed on American colonies as a direct result of financial strain caused by the French and Indian War. This is the first of several related crises in American–British relations that eventually lead to the American Revolution.

Author's Note

I
n 1755, as the early flames of the French and Indian War ignited the American frontier, French raiders slaughtered eleven unresisting Christian members of the Delaware tribe at the Moravian settlement of Gnadenhutten in Pennsylvania. Years later at a settlement reprising the same mission name in the Ohio lands, frontier militia captured ninety-six Christian Delaware men, women, and children, lined them up, and one by one, as the victims prayed, crushed their skulls with mallets.

The tales of the Gnadenhutten massacres, upon which the Bethel Church killings are loosely based, have always wrenched my heart, not just for the obvious brutality inflicted on innocents but also for its deeper symbolism. The tribal victims had assimilated, had trusted, had suffered stigma from their own tribes for their embrace of European ways and European faith. Few episodes in our relations with Native Americans more poignantly raise the question of who were the savages and who the enlightened humans. The incidents just as vividly reflect the deep capacity for spirituality of the woodland tribes, an aspect seldom reflected in our history books but one that had profound effects on many Europeans who befriended them.

While that spirituality animates my leading characters, the plot of
Original Death
is built around the final stages of the bloody mid-century war between Britain and France. Although I have applied a novelist's license to certain details, the broad elements of the conflict reflected herein are faithful to the historic record. The late summer of 1760 brought the final act of that war as combatants closed on Montreal. General Amherst, infamous for his contempt for Native Americans and colonials, deployed troops with Colonel William Johnson from Fort Oswego up the St. Lawrence to rendezvous with regiments arriving from Lake Champlain and a naval fleet sailing upriver. It is remarkable that Amherst dared to assemble several thousand Highland troops for the campaign, not simply because he was creating the largest gathering of Highlanders since their bloody uprising fifteen years earlier, but also because many of those troops were restless, having not been paid for months. King George's army was chronically short of cash, and silver was in such short supply that the military resorted to using Spanish dollars stamped with the army's broad arrow mark. Senior officers were uncomfortably aware that Highland units had mutinied in the past. During the not-too-distant war between Britain and its colonies, no fewer than six Highland regiments would mutiny in America.

Montreal did indeed fall without serious bloodshed, in large part because the powerful Caughnawag Mohawks abruptly withdrew from their alliance with the French as a result of appeals from the Iroquois League and William Johnson. That larger-than-life Irish baronet, who entered battle dressed like an Iroquois warrior, shaped relations with the tribes for two generations. These pages cannot do justice to this complex, colorful adventurer and adopted chieftain; readers who wish to explore his life more deeply would be well rewarded by Fintan O'Toole's biography
White Savage
.

Our popular history texts tend to dismiss mid–eighteenth-century America as a turbulent waypoint on the journey to revolution, but those who take the time to pierce the smoke of battle will find an astonishingly
rich tapestry. Scientific discovery, religious freedom, literary expression, technology, and public education were all blossoming, while at the same time the fabric of entire societies was being ripped apart. The Iroquois, whom Franklin was fond of calling the Romans of the New World, were glimpsing the demise of their once mighty empire. Highlanders struggled to keep their identity alive even though their livelihoods depended on the very British who had gutted their homeland. Orphans and exiles of a dozen European cultures were trying to rediscover themselves at the edge of an ominous wilderness.