A COMPANY OF HEROES

In this lengthy, well documented book the author of Forth to the Wilderness writes of the brutal frontier warfare of the Revolutionary War, in which white settlers, struggling against the British and their ferocious Indian allies, held the West for the Colonies. As early as 1775 land-hungry settlers were infiltrating the ""back country"", an irregular region beyond the mountains extending west and south from New York into Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia; on the control of this region the outcome of the war depended no less than on the better-known eastern campaigns of Washington and his generals. To hold this frontier the British recruited the Indians and turned them loose on the settlers, hoping to restrain their uncertain allies from their usual atrocities; the Indians, obeying no orders, raided as they pleased, bringing horror with them, kidnapping, scalping, torturing, burning captives alive: the settlers retaliated in kind, butchering even friendly Indians. Two great leaders emerged from this bloody conflict; Joseph Brant, the brilliant, educated Indian, who hated Americans with cause, and the superb frontiersman George Rogers Clark, who carried the war to such remote British settlements as Kaskaskia and Vincennes. Little is omitted from this tale of frontier horror. The obvious result of years of scholarly research, the book bristles with names of forgotten men and places and with lurid accounts of Indian tortures, a plethora of detail which adds weight rather than excitement to the narrative. As such it is more for scholars and historians.