OLD WOLF: The Story of Israel Putnam

This biography opens when Israel was eleven and living in Boxwood not far from Salem, Massachusetts. His first trip alone was to Boston, when it was a town of 20,000 souls. After his marriage he moved to Pomfret, Connecticut, where he worked hard as a farmer. At the age of thirty-seven he went off for his first soldiering in the French and Indian Wars. He became a friend of Rogers and his Rangers and was in many tough spots with them. Most of the action in this third of the book is near Lake George, though when captured Israel was carried into Canada. Putnam was fifty-seven at the beginning of the Revolution in which he started as a Brigadier General. From the first he was a friend of Washington, though it was often hard for the commander-in-chief to stand up for old Put's individualistic reactions to orders. Israel fought first at Boston; was quartered on Staten Island; was in charge of the men on Brooklyn Heights; was in Philadelphia at the time of the famous crossing of the Delaware; was in Princeton when Washington was at Morristown; later he was in charge at Peekskill; his last station was near Danbury. A swearing, loyal, tough general, he died at the age of seventy-two in 1790.