THE WILDERNESS WAR

Volume four in the ongoing Winning of America series, the story of the wresting of the North American continent from the Indians. The latest chapter in the saga focuses on the Iroquois' involvement in the warfare on the Pennsylvania and New York frontiers during the American Revolution. The fortunes of the Iroquois League, most of whose tribes backed the Crown, are traced through the vain efforts of its war chief, Joseph Brant, to use the Revolution as an opportunity to stop the encroachment of American settlers on Indian land. Avoiding partisanship, the book graphically displays the brutal nature of Indian warfare without precluding sympathy for the plight of the Six Nations, virtually obliterated as a political entity and fighting force by 1780. Eckert has used primary sources aplenty and seems intimately familiar with the modes of frontier warfare as well as the details of battles and even the terrain on which they took place. These merits also serve to offset his frequently infelicitous efforts to dramatize the narrative by extracting and (more to the point) deducing from his sources dialogue--""My place is with you,"" says a frontier heroine to her military officer fiancÉ--that often reads like a bad Hollywood script.