Customer Reviews

Settlers Forts of Western Pennsylvania

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If one is into the white guilt trip, or is a non-white who wants whites into one, then by default one would slam this book.

It depicts a race war between Indians and whites, with the Indians committing mind-bending tortures and massacres without justification on poor white working folks from back east just trying to survive, folks from Scotland, Ireland or Germany without a dime.

DeMay's book further claims that the Indians of western Pennsylvania were not native at all to the area, but had been ordered out of their Delaware river region (in eastern Pa. and in Dela.) and into western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio and Kentucky by the powerful Iroquois Confederacy under a deal with the English just 20 years before. In fact, it says the area had been uninhabited for centuries before the whites arrived from what is now West Virginia, mostly feisty Scots-Irish and doughty Germans - and all poor folks, not a Bill Gates, fatcat or chablis-sipping professor among them.

I was inspired by the heroism of those European-American men, women and children, especially their toughness mentally. How could a mother go on after seeing her children slow-roasted and eaten in Kitanning (Pa.) by her Indian captors?

What was it like to see your father scalped alive and hot coals poured on his head, or to see a gloating squaw eating your ears and fingers?

Of course, the myth is that only Indians were Native Americans. When Dennis Stanford's book on the Solutreans comes out this year or next (Google him!), the scientific community will have to acknowledge that there are very strong indications that Europeans settled North America at least 5,000 years BEFORE the Indians came from Siberia. The Discovery channel video "Ice Age Columbus" on this subject, from Channel 4 TV in England, is a true eye-opener.

The whole "Kennewick Man" issue is part of this. Why is there a skeleton of an apparent white man from 9,000 B.C. in Washington State, and why do the Indians go to court relentlessly to get it buried without further examination? Why was the skeleton SEIZED by federal authorities under Bill Clinton?

In fact, if Dr. Dennis Stanford (merely the director of anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington!!) is right, then it was the Red Man who committed genocide on the original inhabitants, the Solutrean whites, and Europeans were the true Native Americans.

They were doing the same in our modern historical era, says DeMay, in the 1750-1790s period in western Pennsylvania and many other places, torture and massacre, until they were totally defeated by some very brave men, women and children, the European-Americans. Then only the d atrocities stop that the Indians committed against them and -- on a very routine basis as part of their culture -- against each other, both braves and squaws.

As Jack Nicholson says in "A Few Good Men" to a liberal lawyer, "you can't handle the truth."

I have to agree with Curtis Cleveland. I am not from the school of the "noble, guiltless savage" whose utopia was destroyed by the white man, but Mr Demay's view is decidedly one-sided. He tries to sanitize the massacre at Gnadenhutten by claiming that the peaceful "Moravian" Indians there were knowingly aiding raiding parties against white settlers. This is simply not true and I have never even seen that accusation hinted at in the many years I have been studying the PA/OH frontier. In fact, these Indians and their missionaries were active spies for the rebel government!

Although DeMay has no problem devoting pages to the grisly tortures that the Indians supposedly revelled in, he completely omits the fact that the Moravian Indians were completely unarmed and the brave settlers killed them all, man woman and child, one by one with a cooper's mallet.

This is just one example of the distortion in the book. Combined this with hyperbole like claiming that the Iroquois were the "nazis of the Eastern United States" and what you end up with is prejudiced folk tales masquerading as fact.

If you must buy it, there is no need to pay the outrageous sums I have seen it go for. I picked mine up new for $2 and the publisher still offers it for the MSRP.

School history always has a slant. It is good to have multiple opinions of history, not just a select few.

Really, don't do it. It starts out well enough warning that history can be disturbing and assures a reader would find no comforting myths within these pages. Unfortunately the book immediately plunges into just that delivering what it promises to avoid, "fond fallacies and delicate untruths".

It begins with the usual thrust of these myths, marginalizing the native peoples. Civilization for John A DeMay is something that comes from the East. He doesn't accord that status to Indian societies nor even the white frontier families. He talks of the "silent, primeval country" being "changed from desolate wilderness to civilization". In fact things weren't all that wild. As one traveller of the period is quoted as noticing the forests of the area were mostly clear of underbrush. The northern woodlands had been tended by the Indian civilizations for centuries in order to supplement crops with fresh meat. The woods were kept clear of brush because they were hunting grounds. These were the lands the whites were "taming", parkland and farmland. The author brushes aside the Indians to the point of invisibility. He is able to baldly state on page 29 that "In 1750 no one was here in Western Pennsylvania".

The author claims descent from early white settlers of the area and seems to have inherited their views and prejudices intact. He claims that they "understood war" but they couldn't accept behavior such as a warrior killing a baby or scalping screaming kids. Yet an armed mob of men removed Frederick Stump and his accomplice from jail because they didn't want to see them convicted of killing Indians in just this manner. DeMay's hero worship leaves him unable to realize the contradiction here. It has him white washing away many uncomfortable facts.

You wouldn't, for instance, realize from reading this book that Frederick Stump was a murderous brute. DeMay actually lionizes this man telling a story of rowdy drunken Indians demanding liquor being stoutly resisted by two whites who killed all four men and two women and subsequently "They went several miles away and killed some other Indians they suspected were connected, somehow, to the group at his home." Left out of the story is that Stump fed the Indians rum and it was only after they passed out that he killed them one by one in their sleep. There is no mystery who these "other Indians" were. They were Stump's neighbors after all, living in a couple cabins a few miles up Middle Creek. Stump and his partner went there and killed four more females; the wife of one of the earlier victims, two girls, and an infant.

The Paxton Boys Uprising is similarly sanitized to assuage white guilt and distorted to accent the exceptionalism the author wants to see in his ancestors. Incredibly, the Natives are completely removed from the tale. The opening act, the massacre, is just forgotten. The story of the final annihilation of the once mighty Susquehannock tribe is left untold as is the motive of marching to Philadelphia to kill more pacifist, friendly, Christian Indians. The convictions of the Paxton Boys are overstated while those of their antagonists are slighted. It is true that some "wet" Quakers did take up arms to defend against the alarming rural invasion but they did so knowing they would be disavowed by the Meeting; they would no longer be Quakers. To claim that the Society of Friends abandoned their religious principles en mass and in panic mustered into an army is insulting and wrong. No such help was required in any case as Philadelphia was well defended by troops and cannon as DeMay acknowledges claiming, "It is outrageous to think that it would, or could, be attacked by a mere fifteen hundred men - but those men were willing to try." In actual fact, most of them were not. Reportedly the marchers did number fifteen hundred men at one time but when the extent of the reception they could expect became clear most of them melted away. Only around two hundred crossed the Swede's Ford.

In truth, I would like be able to recommend this book. I have driven by the McDonalds out by South Hills Village countless times without noticing the historical marker for Fort Couch. I'm grateful to John DeMay for making me aware of it. I wish I could trust the stories he relates about events in this area but he has proven such an unreliable reporter that recommending the book would be irresponsible. The historical details are wonderful. It's too bad the author is so interested in justifying the beliefs of his ancestors. Passing on history is commendable. Perpetuating racism is not.