Bloody Mohawk: The French and Indian War & American Revolution on New York's Frontier [Paperback]

Richard Berleth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2009

This sweeping historical narrative chronicles events instrumental in the painful birth of a new nation from the Bloody Morning Scout and the massacre at Fort William Henry to the disastrous siege of Quebec, the lopsided Battle of Valcour Island, the horrors of Oriskany, and the tragedies of the Pennsylvania Wyoming Valley massacre and the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition s destruction of the Iroquois homeland. Caught in the middle of it all was the Mohawk River Valley. Through 1763, culminating with the French & Indian War, a series of colonial conflicts between the French and British raged along the North American frontiers. In the Province of New York, French intrusions were turned back with great loss of blood and treasure at places like Lake George and Ticonderoga, while Mohawk Valley towns were raided, plundered, and sometimes, as with Schenectady, virtually wiped off the map. In the American Revolution, patriots wrenched the Mohawk Valley from British interests and the Iroquois nations at fearsome cost. When the fighting was over, the valley lay in ruins and as much as two-thirds of its population lay dead or had been displaced. But by not holding this vital inland waterway the gateway to the West, the river between the mountains America might have lost the Revolution, as well as much or all of the then-poorly-defined province of New York. Oriskany, Cherry Valley, Cobleskill, Canajoharie, German Flats, Unadilla, Andrustown a line of battle sites and destroyed settlements, colonial and Native American, smoldered the length of the Mohawk Valley by war s end, all the way to the Finger Lakes region where the great towns of the Seneca Indians lay in ruins in the wake of Washington s reprisals for the Wyoming Valley raid. The fury of the war increased year by year in the Mohawk Valley, escalating to total war and near-genocide. It didn t have to be that way. Streaming with colonial traffic, the Mohawk River Valley earlier in the 18th century had become a place where the core ethnic groups of an emerging nation Native Americans, Palatine Germans, Scots-Irish, Dutch, English, and Highland Scots met in commerce and partnership and relative peace and security. Then, wrenched apart by brutal political partisanship, the very social and cultural diversity of the Mohawk corridor made the upheavals when they finally came as violent and pitiless as anywhere.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Bloody Mohawk offers an enjoyable and readable run through the history of the Mohawk River Valley, embroiling the French and British empires, the Iroquois Federation and various American settlers ranging from Dutch fur-traders to German farmers to New England's evangelicals. I love the way Berleth balances a mighty landscape against equally compelling characters. Constant warfare made this strategic waterway a scary place for much of the 18th century, a terror spread over a landscape of rivers, lakes and portages long obscured by modern development. Berleth's keen sense of geography makes readers want to get out their bicycles, canoes and walking boots to explore the physical terrain he animates with historical figures that show the power of dueling empires and organized Native Americans. --Kathleen Hulser, Public Historian, Senior Curator of History, New-York Historical Society

Richard Berleth creates an exceptional narrative here that is forever driven by the unique geography of the Mohawk Valley, as well as by the people who settled there from the powerful Iroquois, to avaricious European fur traders, to the colonials who fought in and ultimately won a series of devastating eighteenth-century wars. --Robert Weibel, New York State Historian & Chief Curator New York State Museum

About the Author

Richard Berleth received his Ph.D from Rutgers University in 1970 and is currently Chair of the Communication Arts Department at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Previously he taught English at Pace University and Russell Sage College, was a managing editor for Time/Life Books, a marketing manager for McGraw-Hill, and a senior vice president at Simon & Schuster. His other books include "The Twilight Lords: An Irish Chronicle,"; "The Orphan Stone: The Minnesinger Dream of Reich"; "Samuel s Choice"; (children s) and "Mary Patten" (children s).

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Black Dome Press; 1 edition (January 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883789664
• ISBN-13: 978-1883789664
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #36,967 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #46 in Books > History > Americas > United States > Colonial Period
  • #80 in Books > History > Americas > United States > Revolution & Founding

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Commendable Compendium, June 28, 2010

By 

Thomas M. Sullivan (Lake George, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Bloody Mohawk: The French and Indian War & American Revolution on New York's Frontier (Paperback)

It is understandable that many `serious' readers of History are put off their feed by an author's reliance, acknowledged or not, on secondary sources. Few things are more disappointing to a buff than to buy a book, look forward to cracking it, and then, upon doing so, experiencing that creeping `been here, done that' realization. The best example of this phenomenon that readily comes to this reader's mind is Winston Groom's "A Storm in Flanders" which, however well-intentioned and admittedly of value to neophytes, offers nothing new to the serious WW I reader. The flip side of this phenomenon, of course, is that such a compendium (if that's not too grudging a word) can be very worthwhile if the author is able to reassemble the threads of what has been written before and weave them into a meaningful and compelling narrative.

Richard Berleth has done so brilliantly in "Bloody Mohawk." Author Berleth sets out to tell the story of the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars as conducted and experienced in New York's Mohawk Valley with a singularity of purpose and geographic fidelity that I believe would be warmly applauded by the authors he unabashedly borrows from. Having been born in Schenectady, now living in Lake George, and having made it my business over the last few decades to read all the histories I could find of these wars as conducted and experienced in Central New York, I think I'm in a reasonably good position to judge his effort, and I find it first-rate.

Berleth holds an English lit Ph.D., and it shows. He can spin a yarn with the best of them, but there's much more. He's manifestly a fine historian in his own right, as evidenced by the fact that I've read multiple descriptions of the people and events with which he treats and found his accounts as fresh and intellectually invigorating as of they were the first I had come upon. Particularly impressive to me was his ability to maintain his focus on the valley and not be seduced into following the exploits of a particularly fascinating character wherever they led or offering his own version of pivotal events such as the French siege of Fort William Henry in 1757 or 1777's Battle of Saratoga. Indeed, he mentions them only in passing and only in relation to the valley and its actors to the extent they were involved in them. The knowledgeable reader loses nothing by these omissions but rather gains new perspective on how these events related to the valley and its inhabitants.

Finally, Author Berleth does an absolutely terrific job of summarizing the `afterward,' the ineffably sad and for a time seemingly hopeless period following the Revolution when the valley's principal actors played out their roles, none more pathetic than the fate of the once-dominant Iroquois confederation, now broken into aimless fragments by their misplaced reliance on at least some whites' integrity and their inability to take advantage of their geographic and military hegemony before they were figuratively, and then literally, buried by white settlement.

So, even if you've read your Parkman, Anderson, and Flexner, don't dismiss this wonderful effort. As far as I'm concerned,"Bloody Mohawk" is proof positive that secondary sources can make for prime reading.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding!, April 10, 2011

By 

Michael E. Fitzgerald (Kingwood, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Bloody Mohawk: The French and Indian War & American Revolution on New York's Frontier (Paperback)

The Mohawk River Valley is the only significant, natural passage through the 2,000 mile long Appalachian Mountains. For over 200 years, the Iroquois League controlled this strategic thoroughfare, and thus all trade with the interior of the continent as far west as the Mississippi River. European settlement came after the close of Queen Anne's War when Britain encouraged Germans from the Palatinate to begin settling in the valley after 1713. The first English settlers came in 1738 under William Johnston, the man who would ultimately destroy the Iroquois League during the French and Indian War. It was Johnson who would contend with the Dutch inhabitants at Albany as events led up to the American Revolution.

Three different wars in the course of 200 years left their mark on this critical passage. French, English, American and Native Americans would make this strategic corridor the most heavily contested real estate on the North American continent. The most savage Native American battles were fought here, with massacres making Custer's Last Stand looking like child's play. Through the Mohawk and the Lake Champlain valleys Britain would defeat France during the French and Indian War. During the American Revolution more men died in the little known Battle of Oriskany than in any other battle, including Saratoga, Yorktown and Bunker Hill. The carnage was simply appalling. In the end, thousands of Loyalists, including the remaining Iroquois, were uprooted and driven into Canada, never to return. And only 40 years later, the completion of the Erie Canal would forever change trading patterns on the North American Continent making New York City the preeminent mercantile center of our Nation and, ultimately, of the world. This is a most amazing story and Richard Berleth's Bloody Mohawk chronicles these wars and the evolution of these events.

I haven't read a book this good in a long, long time. I have always had an interest in the development and settlement of early America's northeast frontier and while the author claims there is really nothing new here, I strenuously beg to differ. I found Richard Berleth's approach to the history of the Mohawk Valley and its contiguous early American thoroughfares provided a clearer and more succinct understanding of the region's early history than any previous work I have enjoyed. Bloody Mohawk is so good it makes you want to vacation here in order to better understand the terrain and then reread this book for an even better level of understanding.

I found this work a remarkable achievement.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, informative and exciting, February 9, 2011

By 

Ben Sano - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bloody Mohawk: The French and Indian War & American Revolution on New York's Frontier (Paperback)

Picking up this book i wasn't sure what to think. I was intrigued by the topic but I normally have trouble getting motivation to read any book. Upon reading it I was immediatly hooked. This book is incredibly informative, and this is coming from someone who has read about the revolution, the iroquois and the history of new york state over the coarse of several years. it opened my eyes to the true history of the mohawk valley in such a way that left me begging for more. this book was also incredibly interesting, even exciting, something that no history book before or after has managed to do. The detail in the history mixed with the exceptional writing style has made this one of the greatest and most informative books i personally have ever read. I think this book could and should make this into a movie, it is that amazing. i recommend this book to anyone who is interested in a part of history that has been incorrectly lost in time.