arndt@lymph.DEC (08/07/85)
You may recall my touting of BLACK ROBE a while back. (Any comments from
someone who has read it???)
In the same vein and a little farther south I now tout to you the NARRATIVES
OF AMERICA series by Allan W. Eckert. These are serious scholarly
reconstructions of our early history in the northeast. Five big volumes so
far and every one a page turner and an antidote to Hollywood tripe.
I'm wading through the volumes I have managed to pick up in the second hand
book stores I haunt. Based upon the historical records left by the people
in the stories he relates, one gets a real sense of the people and places.
I'm into his latest, GATEWAY TO EMPIRE, about Ill. in the late 1700s and
reading about the indian chief Pontiac who in May 1763 raised the tribes
against the British and took 9 of the 10 forts in the area with the fort
of Detriot only holding out for six weeks. He lost 80 indians and the
British lost 2000 in the seige.
Letters, journals, sprinkle the pages.
As in BLACK ROBE the indians are not one-dimensional.
"The implicit obedience and respect which the followers of Tecumseh pay
to him is really astonishing and more than any other circumstance bespeaks
him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce
revolutions and overturn the established order of things."
- William Henry Harrison, Letter, Aug. 7,1811 to Sec. of War,
William Eustis.
From the author's note to GATEWAY TO EMPIRE (applies to the whole series).
"GATEWAY TO EMPIRE is fact, not fiction. The incidents described here
actually occured; the dates are historically accurate; the characters,
regardless of how major or how minor, actually lived the roles in which
they are portrayed." xi
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Blast away from SF for a change of pace!
Regards,
Ken Arndt