Into the American woods

An award-winning historian's beautifully written reconstruction of how Europeans lived in peace and war with Indians on America's colonial frontier. They've been with us since the mythic past, when Hermes carried messages from the gods to the Greeks and Deganawidah with his disciple Hiawatha built the Great League of Peace among the Iroquois. They are the go-betweens, the shadowy figures who move between us and them, linking different worlds. These were the "woods-men," wise in the ways of the American woods, knowledgeable about the other, able to navigate the treacherous shoals of misunderstanding and mistrust. From the Quaker colony's founding in the early 1680s into the 1750s, they did the hard, dirty work that helped maintain the fragile "long peace" between Indians and colonists. But, skilled as they were in the alchemy of translation and negotiation, they could not prevent the sickening plummet from peace to war after 1750. The bloodshed and hatred of frontier conflict at once made go-betweens obsolete and taught the harsh lesson of the woods: the final incompatibility of colonial and native dreams about the continent they shared. Long erased from history, the go-betweens of early America are recovered here in vivid detail.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.