Books: Hero’s Reward

DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK—Walter D. Edmonds—Little, Brown ($2.50).

From 1776 until 1782 the Upper Mohawk Valley in New York was the scene of some of the wildest warfare of the Revolution. Dispossessed Tories who had been driven to Canada raided the small settlements and isolated farms. Indians took advantage of the warfare between whites to hunt scalps, for which they received eight dollars apiece at British headquarters at Niagara. The farmers who made up the U. S. militia hurried home after each victory or defeat, since they had to get on with the crops between battles. Now & then detachments of the regular Continental Army marched in to defend the frontier, seemed always to arrive when they were not needed, to leave just before they were. After six years of intermittent hostilities, the 2,500 men on the militia rolls of the Mohawk Valley had been reduced to less than 800, although only two major battles had been fought and both had beenvictories for the settlers.

Last week these hard years in Mohawk history provided the background for a 592-page historical novel that, unlike most such volumes, was most interesting for its accounts of the unconventional military maneuvers of savages and settlers, least impressive in its pictures of frontier romance. The August choice of the Book-of-the-Month-Club, Drums Along the Mohawk belongs in the imposingly conscientious series of novels (Erie Water, Rome Haul, The Big Barn) that covers New York history from 1776 to 1865. It begins with a long description of the labors of Gilbert and Lana Martin in establishing their farm at Deerfield Settlement, shifts to a glimpse of the local militia harrying suspected Loyalists, to the burning of Deerfield, the battle of Oriskany, the negotiations with Indians, the life of scouts and “timber beasts,” the daily routine in stockades when the raiding parties were strong. Holding fast to the known history of the period, Author Edmonds has invented only 13 of the hundred odd characters who people his book, has taken only minor fictional liberties in depicting the remainder. Consequently readers may occasionally be startled to find important figures appearing and disappearing in the story as unexpectedly as Indians darting through the underbrush, are likely to read on for the sake of Author Edmonds’ scenes of battle.

Gilbert and Lana Martin found out what the War was going to mean when Indians led by Tories burnt their five-acre farm that represented two years of labor, killed the cow that represented all their wealth. Then when the Valley people were cooped up in the stockade at Little Stone Arabia, Lana’s first child was born dead. She turned against her husband,lived in dread of the future, while he became embittered, sullen, tried to forget his lost aspirations by exhausting himself hunting in the woods. They rented a one-room shack in German Flats, became the hired hands of a kindly, harsh-voiced old widow, until Gilbert was called out with the militia for an attack on the British near Fort Stanwix. In the ambush at Oriskany Gilbert was wounded, lost some of his friends, but found when he returned that he had rewon his wife’s love. Thereafter the Martins lived in harmony while the battles raged around them, raised two sons, raced for the forts during the raids, saw their work destroyed by Indians again & again.

All around them families disappeared in the slaughter while survivors went to pieces under the strain. A thick-headed Loyalist arrested early in the War spent a year in the water-soaked mines of New gate prison, escaped, wasted the rest of his life wandering through the woodslooking for his wife. Genteel Mrs. Demooth, most cultivated lady of Deerfield Settlement, went raving mad, shouted Biblical curses at her maid. Feeble-minded Nancy picked up with a raiding British soldier,bore his child in the woods during an attack, was saved by an Indian who took her for his squaw. Organized warfare in the wilderness was a prolonged nightmare, with militiamen quarreling with regulars, regulars making more enemies by attacking the wrong Indian tribes. WhenGeneral Herkimer, superb Indian fighter, led 800 militiamen against Butler’s force of a thousand British regulars and Tories and a thousand Indians, he was driven into an ambush by his cocky, inexperiencedofficers. After he had driven the enemy off, directed a six-hour battle despite a shattered leg, he lost his life when General Benedict Arnold sent an inexperienced doctor to amputate. Before the War was over Valley people were about as bitter about the Continental Congress as they had been about the Tories. When Gilbert Martin went to draw his militiaman’s pay after a summer of fighting, he found that each battle had been calculated separately, that his hero’s reward came to $4.27.