Original Death (53 page)

The backdrop of
Original Death
draws from this fertile context. That world was indeed populated with Christian Mohawks, self-exiled Jacobites, Iroquois rangers, disillusioned missionaries, tea-sipping warriors, and the traumatized former tribal captives I have called ghostwalkers. The Forsey Brothers were actual military clothiers in eighteenth-century Albany, former iron mines were being used as prisons, and in the West, a charismatic tribal leader who called himself the Prophet was joining with Chief Pontiac to unleash a bloody rampage against Europeans. Also leaving tracks in chronicles of the day was the natural affinity between Highlanders and Native Americans that anchors this series. Major General David Stewart, renowned recorder of the Highland experience, wrote that when the first Highland troops marched to Albany, “Indians flooded from all quarters to see the strangers, who they believed were of the same extraction as themselves and therefore received them as brothers.”

We have been taught to look for the roots of the United States in the war that began in 1775, but the seeds of our nation were planted in these earlier battlefields. This was when British prejudice against natives and colonials began to impinge on the lives of thousands, when these same colonists came to realize they could muster effective fighting forces without relying on British officers, and when many colonists began thinking of themselves as Americans. The polarizing measures soon to be imposed by London were directly linked to these years, including the hated revenue laws designed to pay debts incurred during this earlier war.

These years also marked the beginning of the end for the woodland tribes, and a sense of inevitable tragedy was seeping into the tribal consciousness. The Iroquois Council struggled to maintain its integrity as unfamiliar forces pushed to compromise age-old traditions. In a very real sense it was the honor of the Iroquois people and the bond of duty they felt to the British that caused the Mohawk allies of the French to lay down their arms, assuring British victory in the long and bloody war. Less than a generation later it was that same sense of duty that finally broke the back of the venerated Iroquois League, for its steadfast alignment with the British sent the Continental Army into Iroquoia on a path of destruction that rivaled Sherman's march to the sea in the next century. In the end it was not Hurons or French or western tribes but American soldiers who annihilated what historian Sidney Fisher labeled the “greatest advance in civilization” that Native Americans ever achieved.

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LIOT
P
ATTISON