Joseph Brant: Mohawk
Description:... "The bloodcurdling yell of the Indian on the warpath was a reality--not a cliché, in the days of Joseph Brant: Mohawk. He must have struggled often to avoid joining in that yell of pagan ecstasy in battle in the days of the American Revolution--of Oriskany and the massacre of Wyoming. We do know his struggle--the inward, intense, noble struggle of Indian and White Man within one body, of Indian and White Man within one mind--for Joseph Brant had been schooled in the virtues and hypocrisies of the White Man in a school which New Englanders later molded into Dartmouth College. Here, for the first time, is told in its completeness the touching story of the twofold Joseph Brant--a man with the heart of a Mohawk, by no means devoid of Indian nobility, yet with the spirit of a Christian missionary--he was a conforming protestant--facing a terrible conflict with the encroaching forces of the European West transplanted to America- an irresistible tide that was driving his Mohawk kin to the wall. The Iroquois Confederation was cited as a model of practical government in frontier days even by Benjamin Franklin. Joseph Brant knew the merits of his Indian kin, and strove with all his might to help the White Man understand them; Brandt, knew, too, the dynamism of the white civilization. In the contrast of the two--the Mohawk's and the White Man's cultures--lay the drama of Joseph Brant's struggle for inward unity. He was like Kipling's Asiatic Indian who, hearing the cries of his compatriots rioting in the streets when fanaticism seized the minds of men, could not resist rushing into the crowd, educated and cultivated though he was, to shout with the mob. The story of Joseph Brant is one of the greatest spun on American soil, of drama intrinsically Greek, in its relentlessness, but historic and American in its atmosphere and color." -- Provided by publisher
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