BOOKS: Drums Along the Mohawk

[Aelred_Minor]

I’ve recently started reading this book (the 1936 historical novel by Walter D. Edmonds, on which the 1939 film of the same name was based) because it takes place in my area and because I have an interest in the time period. So far there have been some non-graphic descriptions of the sexuality of a married couple which I have not entirely approved of, and so far the only portrayals of religion have been rather cynical, but that’s not what I wanted to ask about.

Does anyone know what the historical accuracy of this book is? The two main characters are fictional of course as are a few others and no one could expect the little descriptive details to be based on historical records, but the author’s introduction to the book makes the claim that the historical events depicted are quite accurate, with a few minor exceptions that he lays out. However I half-remember reading an article in a newspaper a few years ago, maybe it was the tenth anniversary of the author’s death or something, which as I recall claimed the book was not so accurate after all. I can’t find any real info on the internet about it though.

Even more than the individual events I’m wondering if the descriptions of life in Upstate New York in the 18th century are accurate, both for the white settlers and the (rather unflattering) descriptions of the Indians.

I know it’s a long shot, but does anyone here have any knowledge of this subject?

 

[CradleJourney]

No personal knowledge - but could you contact a local historical society in the area? If they didn’t have the information, I’m sure they’d be glad to connect you to sources that would. They are a very handy resource (and much more accurate than google or wikipedia in my experience)

 

[Lion_of_Narnia]

As someone who lived in Herkimer NY for two years (1978-80) going to community college (yay HCCC! :extrahappy: ) the battle of Oriskeny is still considered a big deal as it stopped one of the British advances through NY–at a horrible cost to the colonists.

I’ve not read the book but the John Ford movie had a lot of problems–especially in the portrayl of Indians. We still as a culture wernt up to admiting that American expansion came with the cost of theft and conquest–and potraying the victims as silly drunken savages meant you didnt have to look long and hard what some of our ancestors quite cheerfully did.

 

[empther]

I don’t know anything about Drums along the Mohawk,
but if you’re interested in this genre,
take at look at James Fenimore Cooper:

He wrote a series of books about Indians which have come to be called the “leatherstockings tales”…

The Pioneers: The Sources of the Susquehanna, A Descriptive Tale (1823),
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826),
The Prairie: A Tale (1827),
The Pathfinder: The Inland Sea (1840), and
The Deerslayer: The First War Path (1841)

He also wrote many other books…

Precaution (1820),
The Spy (1821),
The Pilot (1823),
Tales for Fifteen: Imagination and Heart (under pseudonym Jane Morgan, 1823),
Lionel Lincoln (1825),
The Red Rover (1828),
Notions of the Americans (1828),
The Bravo (1831),
The Heidenmauer (1832),
The Headsman (1832),
The Monikins (1835),
Sketches of Switzerland (1836),
Homeward Bound (1838), and its sequel
Home as Found (1838),
The American Democrat (1838),
Chronicles of Cooperstown (1838),
The Two Admirals (1842),
The Wing-and-Wing (1842),
The Battle of Lake Erie (1843),
Wyandotte (1843),
Ned Myers or, a Life Before the Mast (1843),
Afloat and Ashore (1844), and its sequel
Miles Wallingford (1844),
Satanstoe (1845),
The Chainbearer (1845),
The Redskins (1846),
Jack Tier (1846),
The Crater (1847),
Oak Openings (1848),
The Sea Lions (1849),
The Ways of the Hour (1850),
The Headsman (1860),
Wyandotte (1871),
The Water Witch (1871), and
The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1871).

Mark Twain wrote a scathing article criticizing Cooper’s writing. Granted Cooper’s work was probably more escapist entertainment than Twain’s more meaningful stories,
but Twain’s works don’t have the battles and other dramatic elements of Cooper’s stories.
It’s all about what you’re looking for.

Amazon KINDLE offers Cooper’s complete works for $2.99 !!
amazon.com/Delphi-Complete-Fenimore-Illustrated-ebook/dp/B00DF562WW/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373731396&sr=1-6&keywords=james+fenimore+cooper

( But I wonder if any of his books has a scene as memorable as Theresa landing the plane? :extrahappy: )

 

[Aelred_Minor]

As someone who lived in Herkimer NY for two years (1978-80) going to community college (yay HCCC! :extrahappy: ) the battle of Oriskeny is still considered a big deal as it stopped one of the British advances through NY–at a horrible cost to the colonists.

I’ve not read the book but the John Ford movie had a lot of problems–especially in the portrayl of Indians. We still as a culture wernt up to admiting that American expansion came with the cost of theft and conquest–and potraying the victims as silly drunken savages meant you didnt have to look long and hard what some of our ancestors quite cheerfully did.

I haven’t actually seen the movie. There are certainly a lot of unflattering portrayals of American Indians in this book as I continue reading through it, but there are a number of positive descriptions as well. And an episode in which US troops slaughtered a village full of non-hostile Indians is described with a definite implication that it was wrong. On the other hand one Indian character is given such preternatural powers of predicting the weather and the behavior of animals that it passes all credibility.

One thing that particularly surprised me was the idea that the Indians never bathed and smelled terrible, unlike the white settlers. This is the opposite of what I remember them teaching me in high school, though you can’t trust high school history classes any more than old historical novels.

I imagine that Edmonds at least would have thought he was presenting a balanced view of the Iroquois, whatever the actual accuracy of it. His portrayal of black slaves on the other hand is nothing but concentrated racism, with none of the complexity he gives to all the other demographics in the novel. They are, so far, invariably stupid and incompetent, with hanging jaws and rolling eyes and so forth, and not the slightest hint that their enslavement might have been wrong or that they might have had anything but a goofy dog-like loyalty to their owners. I think that’s really the way white people saw blacks in the 1930s, or imagined they would have been in the days of slavery.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

I don’t know anything about Drums along the Mohawk,
but if you’re interested in this genre,
take at look at James Fenimore Cooper:

He wrote a series of books about Indians which have come to be called the “leatherstockings tales”…

The Pioneers: The Sources of the Susquehanna, A Descriptive Tale (1823),
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826),
The Prairie: A Tale (1827),
The Pathfinder: The Inland Sea (1840), and
The Deerslayer: The First War Path (1841)

He also wrote many other books…

Precaution (1820),
The Spy (1821),
The Pilot (1823),
Tales for Fifteen: Imagination and Heart (under pseudonym Jane Morgan, 1823),
Lionel Lincoln (1825),
The Red Rover (1828),
Notions of the Americans (1828),
The Bravo (1831),
The Heidenmauer (1832),
The Headsman (1832),
The Monikins (1835),
Sketches of Switzerland (1836),
Homeward Bound (1838), and its sequel
Home as Found (1838),
The American Democrat (1838),
Chronicles of Cooperstown (1838),
The Two Admirals (1842),
The Wing-and-Wing (1842),
The Battle of Lake Erie (1843),
Wyandotte (1843),
Ned Myers or, a Life Before the Mast (1843),
Afloat and Ashore (1844), and its sequel
Miles Wallingford (1844),
Satanstoe (1845),
The Chainbearer (1845),
The Redskins (1846),
Jack Tier (1846),
The Crater (1847),
Oak Openings (1848),
The Sea Lions (1849),
The Ways of the Hour (1850),
The Headsman (1860),
Wyandotte (1871),
The Water Witch (1871), and
The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1871).

Mark Twain wrote a scathing article criticizing Cooper’s writing. Granted Cooper’s work was probably more escapist entertainment than Twain’s more meaningful stories,
but Twain’s works don’t have the battles and other dramatic elements of Cooper’s stories.
It’s all about what you’re looking for.

Amazon KINDLE offers Cooper’s complete works for $2.99 !!
amazon.com/Delphi-Complete-Fenimore-Illustrated-ebook/dp/B00DF562WW/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373731396&sr=1-6&keywords=james+fenimore+cooper

( But I wonder if any of his books has a scene as memorable as Theresa landing the plane? :extrahappy: )

I’ve read The Last of the Mohecans and am thinking about reading the other Leatherstocking books. James Fenimore Cooper certainly wasn’t the most skilled American author when you compare him to the likes of Washington Irving or Edgar Allan Poe, or to more modern novelists like Edmonds (or to Mark Twain I suppose, though it’s been ages since I read anything by him). But I still enjoyed the book, and again there is the local interest as I live not all that far from Cooperstown (I like to be cryptic about my exact location since I’ve made some unflattering posts in the past about my parish and diocese).

 

[WildeKurt]

One thing that particularly surprised me was the idea that the Indians never bathed and smelled terrible, unlike the white settlers. This is the opposite of what I remember them teaching me in high school, though you can’t trust high school history classes any more than old historical novels.

I imagine to our modern standards, both groups would smell bad.

Another author of note regarding historical fiction is Kenneth Roberts who wrote a series of books regarding the time period just before and after the American Revolution. Well worth reading. He did not always paint the heros as heros or villians as villians.

I’m reading a book with my son about the Blackhawk war which doesn’t put the young US government or settlers in a very good light.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

I don’t know if anyone is following this thread, but I finished the book.

Edmonds definitely did not paint everyone as simple heros and villains. His description of “negros” never got more sophisticated and you even had the most sympathetic character of the whole book wishing she could afford a slave, but other than that there were a lot of layers to his descriptions of the people and events.

There were atrocities committed on both sides of the war, and Edmonds takes pains to point this out. One of the most poignant I got to after my earlier posts on this thread, and it involved the Indians.

It was a description of the American destruction of the Onondaga towns around what is now Syracuse, NY. The episode is seen through the eyes of an Oneida Indian who was a friend and ally of the Americans but rushed to warn the Onondagas of the coming destruction. Because of his warning most of the villages had been abandoned by the time the American troops got there, but one a little distant from the others had not been. The Oneida visited there later and saw the girls who had been raped and beaten and lay dying in the dirt, and went away feeling that he did not understand white men. That’s not exactly ignoring the things that were done to the American Indians, though I’m not surprised if that material did not make it into the movie.

The book was not written from a blindly patriotic American perspective either. If there was an overarching historical message to it I think it was that the German and Dutch people of the Mohawk Valley were mistreated by the “Yankees” (meaning American-born people of English descent) on both sides of the war, and fought not so much for any larger political cause as to maintain themselves in a terrifying world. In particular to judge from both the author’s introduction and the book itself part of the purpose seems to be to assert that Colonel Bellinger’s seizing grain meant for the Continental army and giving it to the local farmers instead was justified and even heroic. That’s one subject which I would be interested to know the historical accuracy of.

But even this theme is not pursued without a sympathetic look at the other side. One Loyalist character in particular is followed in a very sympathetic way, and when he curses the whole Dutch race for the things they have done to him you feel he is somewhat justified.

Anyway, I think it was a pretty good book despite its faults. I have heard of Kenneth Roberts. Maybe I’ll try a book of his soon.

 

[Amyjo99]

I’ll have to dig around, I think I have the book somewhere in one of my shelves. I have the movie and enjoy it, although there are the problems with stereotypes that you mentioned about the book.