White Savage
William Johnson and the Invention of America
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A dramatic, exciting and tragic book about the Irish fur trapper who held the fate of America and the British Empire in his hands.
William Johnson began life as a poor Irish Catholic peasant. After converting to Protestantism, he emigrated to America where he became the leading fur trader in the British colony and one of its richest men. He also 'went native', marrying an Indian woman and adopting the religion of her tribe, the Iroquois. When war broke out between the French and English, Johnson held the fate of the British Empire in his hands. If the Indians fought with the French, the British were doomed.
A fascinating historical biography of this adventurous man, whose reinvention in the New World made him the first modern American.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the center of drama critic O'Toole's new book is an Irishman who migrated to New York in the 1730s. William Johnson began to trade with nearby Indians and quickly became knowledgeable about and beloved by the Mohawks, who adopted him as a sachem. Johnson, who became a key figure in the coexistence between Mohawks and Europeans, emerges as charismatic, a tad vain and very libidinous. He took a paramour, a German servant girl named Catharine Weisenberg, with whom he had children and whom he may or may not have married. Before Catharine's death, Johnson took Mohawk lovers and fathered Mohawk children; after her death, he married an Indian woman, Molly Brant. O'Toole reads Johnson's 1774 death as a turning point in Anglo-Indian relations; within three years, the Mohawks were siding with Brits in the American Revolution. Johnson, O'Toole argues, embodied the colonists' fantasies about the Indians i.e., that their barbarity could be civilized and diluted by contact with enlightened colonists. O'Toole (A Traitor's Kiss) brings together great man history and real analytical rigor; this book should be a winner with academics and history hobbyists alike. 8 pages of b&w photos, 2 maps, not seen by PW.
