Dr. Kate: Angel on Snowshoes

The Hollywood screenwriter, Adele Commandini saw an episode of TV's "This Is Your Life" which moved her to research and write a full-length biography. Dr. Kate: Angel on Snowshoes was a nationwide bestseller in 1956.

In 2009 the Wisconsin Historical Society Press released another book by the same title for a juvenile audience. I recommend the current and much abbreviated Dr. Kate: Angel on Snowshoes especially to schoolchildren, but also to any interested adults. I have thought very highly of Dr. Kate since I visited the Dr. Kate Pelham Newcomb Museum in Woodruff a few years ago. And it seems the author, Rebecca Hogue Wojahn, understands what was so special about Dr. Kate: she simply wanted to help people.

There are, of course, other remarkable things about Dr. Kate. Wojahn manages not only to include them but she also puts them in context for today's young readers.

It was about 1890. Kate was just four years old and her mother died in childbirth. That and similar tragedies led to an interest in a career in medicine (and the specialty of obstetrics), which, of course, was discouraged back then because women weren't supposed to become doctors.  Kate Pelham was well into her 20's by the time her father realized that a medical career would make his daughter happy. From that point on he supported her in that goal. When Kate had two marriage proposals to choose from, her father also told her to pick the one that would make her happy, even if he was a mechanic instead of a doctor.

The man that Kate married, Bill Newcomb, was supportive of Kate's career. However, it wasn't long before Bill started coughing. Bill had previously worked at a defense plant where he breathed metal particles that remained in his lungs. Living in Detroit was making Bill's condition worse. He moved to Wisconsin's northwoods and Kate soon followed.  Just making a go of it away from civilization was tough and when Kate was about to give birth the child didn't make it. She knew it was the doctor's fault - he had given her a strong sedative. This sad event appears to have been such a turn-off that Kate had no intention of resuming her medical career.

In 1928, Kate gave birth to Tommy. When Tommy's fingers were "crushed" by a car door a few years later, Kate's expertise in first aid was discovered by the local physician. He angrily told Kate that her talent was being wasted and at a later date he called and told her that a woman near her house would die if Kate didn't go to her. So Kate Newcomb was pushed back into her old career.

From that point on, as the back cover of Dr. Kate states, she went to her patients "by car, by snowmobile, by canoe and on snowshoes. [And she] never sent a bill," often accepting things like canned vegetables or firewood as payment. I imagine that is enough material for a book right there. But the story isn't over. Kate's love for the people of the northwoods was reciprocated by the community. When Dr. Kate made it known that the area needed a hospital, the people went to work raising money for it - and that fundraising effort might just be the best part of the whole book.

 

Algonkian Church History: Top Seven Posts of 2014

[caption id="attachment_9175" align="aligncenter" width="300"] From the back cover of Proud and Determined.[/caption]

My most popular blogposts this year may have been created prior to this year and prior to the creation of Stockmohistory.com.

Based on the number of hits received thus far this year, seven posts stood out as fan favorites:



1. Bury My Heart at the Monastery

2. A Map of the Stockbridge Mohicans' "Trail of Tears"

3. The Many Trails Symbol and a pdf about the Folk Art of Wisconsin Indians

4. What Was the American Indian Population in 1492?

5. Little Turtle, William Wells, and "Mad" Anthony Wayne

6. Still There! The Lenape and Nanticoke Indians of New Jersey

7. Joseph Smith and the Legend of the Golden Bible

 

John Brown's Place in American History

Once very controversial and now largely forgotten, John Brown certainly deserves acknowledgement as a great American freedom fighter.

But he was an outlaw who opposed the law of the land. (Slavery.)

But he advocated to bring about change through violence. (That isn't cool.)

And, although he may have tried as hard to end slavery as anybody, he was white, so he isn't likely to get mentioned during Black History Month. (There isn't time to honor a white man during Black History Month, is there?)

Who was John Brown and how does he now fit into American History?

Five years ago, John Hendrix gathered up all the recent work historians were doing on John Brown, interpreted it into clear language, drew up illustrations, and the result is an outstanding childrens' book:

John Brown: His Fight for Freedom

 

Since this blog is about church history, I should point out that John Brown's religion motivated him to work to abolish slavery. Hendrix gets even more specific than that.

Behold the tears of such as were oppressed and they had no comforter, and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. -Ecclesiastes 4:1

This Bible passage caused something to happen inside John Brown's chest and he made an oath to fight slavery then and there (page 9).

When Kansas was set to vote on becoming a free state or a slave state, pro-slavery "ruffians" destroyed crops, burned settlements and killed people who got in their way. When the ruffians made threats towards John Brown he wouldn't stand for it. He and his sons took five pro-slavery settlers to a creek and killed them with broadswords (page 15).

From that point on, John Brown wasn't just an outlaw to the federal government, he was a crazed madman to many but a folk hero to others.

Violence - even used for a good cause - is what it is. But, by its own nature, slavery required violence and perpetuated more violence. John Hendrix makes the point that many, many free people were opposed to slavery before the Civil War, but not many people were doing much about it. Except talking. And talking didn't get it done. However, at the same time, Hendrix says "John didn't believe bloodshed was the answer."

Anyway, the reason I wrote this post today is that today is the 155th anniversary of John Brown's famous raid of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. Unfortunately, I don't have space here to summarize the raid. Instead, I recommend that you either read about it at U.S. history.org or, better yet, get your hands on Hendrix's book and read pages 18 to 35.

How Was Lead Mined by the Ho-Chunk?

My last post was about one particular lead mine worked by Ho-Chunk Indians for fifteen years before it was sold to a white man. White miners were probably using picks and shovels when they first settled in the lead district which is now made up of parts of Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. Unfortunately, I don't have a complete description of their processes.

On the other hand, Moses Meeker in his "Early History of the Lead Region of Wisconsin" (page 281) gives us a pretty thorough description of Ho-Chunk lead mining.

Their tools were a hoe made for the Indian trade , an axe, and a crowbar, made of an old gun barrel flattened at the breach, which they used for removing the rock. Their mode of blasting was rather tedious to be sure; they got dry wood, kindled a fire along the rock as far as they wished to break it. After getting the rock hot, they poured cold water upon it which so cracked it that they could pry it up.

White miners would eventually dominate the lead district. I have read a rather vague statement somewhere that the white miners used technology to force the Indians out of lead mining. However, other factors are also noted by Meeker: 1) the Indians' tendency to view mining as "women's work" meant that their physically strongest people weren't digging or blasting, and 2) although Indians were skilled at discovering sites to mine lead, the same Indians were also often willing to show white miners these sites in exchange for whiskey (page 290).



As evidenced by the state flag, mining was still an essential part of Wisconsin's economy when it became a state in 1848.

The Old Buck Lead Mine

Old Buck was a Ho-Chunk Indian who spoke broken English well enough to deal with his white neighbors.

He lived in the area that we would now call Illinois, but present-day Wisconsin and Iowa were also part of his stomping grounds.

Moses Meeker, was qualified to write "Early History of [the] Lead Region of Wisconsin" because he was active in lead mining in the 1820's. The title of Meeker's recollection, of course, is problematic, because, first of all, our current state boundaries were not yet established at that time and also because lead mining went on, not only in present-day Wisconsin, but also in present-day Illinois and Iowa.

[caption id="attachment_7994" align="aligncenter" width="577"] An artist's conception of Galena [Illinois] after Indians stopped working in the mines.[/caption]For the most part, Meeker capably describes the early days of lead mining in Wisconsin. My only complaint is that he is somewhat inexact or inconsistent on page 281.

There were about five hundred Indians; their women quite industrious miners, but their men would not work.

He must have meant that to be a relative statement because he later tells us that "Old Buck was reputed to be the best miner among the Indians" (and Old Buck, of course, was a man).

Old Buck discovered a lead deposit less than two miles from where Galena, Illinois now stands. He and his wife and their friends worked that spot for fifteen years. It must have been a particularly good place to mine. On page 281-282 Meeker states that Old Buck sold his mine to Colonel J. Johnson in 1833 for $300. Johnson continued to operate The Old Buck Lead Mine for a number of years.

Was Old Buck cheated by Johnson? Well, looking back on it now, we might guess that he was. But in those days, whites engaged in maneuvers that forced Natives out of the mining industry. White technology was used as an economic weapon. So by paying Old Buck real money for his mine - even if it wasn't what we'd call "full value," the colonel was probably being more ethical than a lot of the other whites were in the pre-statehood lead mining days.

Some Native Nicknames and Logos must go

An NFL referee that retired after last season has just revealed that he asked not to officiate at Washington Redskins games in 2006 because he understood that the team's nickname was offensive to many Native Americans. The NFL honored his request. The former ref, Mike Carey, was interviewed by Keith Olbermann on ESPN.

[caption id="attachment_7664" align="alignright" width="294"] Some nicknames and images are more offensive than others.[/caption]

Earlier this year, the NFL franchise based in Washington had six trademarks cancelled because, in the words of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, they were "disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered." (I think the best treatment of this issue in the media was in the New Yorker Magazine.) Despite losing their trademarks, however, the team will still be allowed to use their disrespectful nickname while the ruling is appealed, a process that will probably last a number of years.

In 2012, residents of North Dakota voted to scrap their University's long-held nickname and the mascot that went with it. The team formerly known as "the Fighting Sioux," currently has no nickname and no mascot, according Wikipedia. What happened in North Dakota prompted ESPN columnist Paul Lukas to write "Time to rethink Native American imagery."

I've said many times that Indians don't agree on everything. They are not just Indians, of course, they are individuals. What may be offensive to one Indian isn't always offensive to another. But, in a country with millions of Native Americans, even if only a significant minority of them are offended by a particular nickname, mascot, or image, it still adds up to too many people being hurt.

While few people want a world with language police coercing us into political correctness, and most people recognize the importance of "not taking themselves too seriously," those facts still leave us with plenty of room to condemn many - but not all - nicknames and images associated with Natives.

The argument some make that sports team nicknames were meant to "honor" Natives usually doesn't pass the smell test. But there are tribes, such as the Seminoles, who have made agreements with athletic departments, essentially approving that their names and other associations can be used by the teams. There may be other exceptions where something related to Native culture or history is used with enough respect to grace athletes uniforms. Certainly there are some nicknames and images that are more offensive than others.

Probably the best general article about this topic that I've read is "A Century of Racist Sports Team Names" by Matt Connolly and Ian Gordon (originally published in Mother Jones).

What do you think?

 

Norman Rockwell's Unfinished Painting of Konkapot and John Sergeant

[caption id="attachment_7325" align="aligncenter" width="604"] Norman Rockwell referred to this painting informally as his "Reverend and Indian picture." It was never finished.[/caption]

Deborah Solomon, the art critic and author of Norman Rockwell's most recent (2013) biography, discusses the subjects of his paintings and whatever else might be behind them.

In a previous post about Rockwell, I noted that he never finished a painting that featured John Sergeant and Konkapot. But it wasn't for lack of trying. Rockwell began the project several years before he died. What kind roadblock kept the painting from being finished? The explanation has a lot to do with Rockwell's inner life and relationship with his brother.

As Solomon (432) tells it, Rockwell "had never been nostalgic for his own childhood." He had no sisters and was not at all close to his only brother, Jarvis. Although he traveled a lot, Rockwell "did not go down to Florida for his brother's last illness or funeral" and when Jarvis died in 1973, "the brothers had not spoken for a long time."

Solomon continues (432-433):

Although Rockwell declined to articulate his feelings over his brother's death, he did make a painting during this period that seems to hint at their complicated relationship. He referred to it as his Reverend and Indian picture. It would consume him for many years and might be seen as a symbolic portrait of Rockwell (the prissy Reverend) and his brother (the strapping Indian).

Rockwell began the painting in 1972, but a year later, had made almost no progress on it.

On May 12, 1973, just three days after he learned of his brother's death, Rockwell wrote on his calendar "Very mixed up today but I will work it out. Tomorrow I get to work on Reverend and Indian picture. Bewildered"(quoted in Solomon 433).

In historical reality, Konkapot might not have been a lot taller than John Sergeant - but in the picture Konkapot is a lot taller than Sergeant. In historical reality, Konkapot was eighteen years older than Sergeant which is another thing that doesn't appear to be reflected in the artist's work. Instead of basing their work on rigorous historical research, artists often fall back on themes existing in their own psyches. Solomon notes that a familiar theme in Rockwell's work is to show "two men, one disproportionately larger than the other"(433).

In the end, Rockwell's "Reverend and Indian picture" says more about the artist himself than it does about Rev. Sergeant or Konkapot.

 

Non-Indian Residents of Stockbridge, MA: Arlo Guthire

[caption id="attachment_7237" align="aligncenter" width="426"] Arlo Guthrie, 1969[/caption]

Arlo Guthrie went to high school in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Stockbridge School, a boarding school, was unique in its time because it promoted racial and ethnic diversity from its inception in the 1940's. Students were also "required to assemble after breakfast and listen to 20 minutes of recorded music...chosen by a very limited number of faculty, who provided brief commentary" according to Wikipedia.

Ray Brock, an architect by training, and his wife Alice, who had been thrown out of Sarah Lawrence College for 'supporting unpopular political causes,' started working at the Stockbridge School in 1962 (New York Times, July 30, 1969). Ray taught shop classes and Alice was the school librarian. Ray and Alice befriended some of the creative students at the school, one being Arlo Guthrie.

Arlo graduated from the Stockbridge School in 1965.  After a short attempt at college, Arlo returned to western Massachusetts and may have been one of the fifteen young friends of Ray and Alice's who were staying with them in an old church that had been purchased by Alice's mother. The series of events that would follow is well-known, having been made into an eighteen-and-a-half-minute song which was the basis of Alice's Restaurant, the movie.

If you haven't seen the movie or heard the song, the best place to get the gist of Alice's Restaurant is this npr interview from 2005.

Hollywood classified the movie as a comedy - and for good reason: it was funny.  But there was certainly something about Alice's Restaurant that spoke volumes against the Vietnam War. The song became a hippie anthem. (When Guthrie heard that President Richard Nixon owned a copy of his eighteen-and-a-half-minute song and remembered that Nixon's famous tapes had an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, he joked that there was silence on the Nixon tapes because the president was listening to his song.)

Using the internet, it isn't hard these days to find information about Alice Brock. But one thing that I read in a tribal newsletter (it was one of those papers I can no longer find, maybe I threw it away) is that the same Alice gave a tour to the Stockbridge Mohicans during one of their historical trips to the homeland in the 1970's.

 

So the musical artist who represented the young anti-establishment generation and the visual artist whose work most clearly represented the older generation were both living in the same small town: Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Norman Rockwell's most recent biographer, Deborah Solomon (American Mirror, 2013), tells us how the two men got along.

[Guthrie] and Rockwell met at least a few times. Guthrie said the introduction was made by his physician, Dr. Campbell...a longtime friend (and onetime model) of Rockwell. "All of the people Norman used as models were friends of mine," Guthrie remarked years later (396).

When touring as a solo act in either Norway or Sweden, Arlo Guthrie felt lonely. Solomon quotes his description of how he cheered up.

"I walk in to just get a beer and a sandwich somewhere and I'm sitting there and I look up on the wall and there was a picture of Dr. Campbell and the kid and a couple of other Rockwell paintings. I suddenly looked around and I thought, 'you know what, I know all of these people' and it made it so freaking nice"(397).

 

Arlo Guthrie's own site is Arlonet.

Alice Brock also has a website.

Read more about Arlo, Alice and Alice's Restaurant at The Food Timeline.

Non-Indian Residents of Stockbridge, MA: Norman Rockwell

As one of America's most famous painters ever, the criticism against Norman Rockwell was that he was more of an illustrator than an artist. Not only did he understand that criticism, but he struggled with it.

Rockwell began his career before television and even before color photography. At that time, magazines were the dominant visual entertainment medium and talented people like Norman Rockwell were in demand as illustrators. For many years, Rockwell - a native of New York City - was employed by the Boy Scouts and their magazine Boys' Life and by The Saturday Evening Post, for which he illustrated 321 covers.

While living in Arlington, Vermont, Rockwell's second wife, Mary, had a rather strange episode of "screaming and crying" that, according to Rockwell's most recent biographer, Deborah Solomon (2013, 269-270), had something to do with feelings she had for the family doctor. It was that same doctor, Solomon tells us, who thought Mrs. Rockwell "needed to spend some time drying out at a retreat, and he referred her to the Austen Riggs Center, a small psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts"(270).



Norman Rockwell sorely missed his wife - not just as a wife, but she also informally managed his studio - and he also worried about the gossip going around town that his wife had a crush on the doctor. To make a long story short, Norman and his sons moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to be with their wife and mother. They bought a house near the hospital campus in 1954.

The artist himself suffered from depression. In researching her book, Deborah Solomon gained access to some of Mr. Rockwell's medical records, including a letter that his psychotherapist, Erik Erikson, wrote to a colleague who was treating Mrs. Rockwell. Norman had been invited on a trip to Europe over the summer and Erikson tried to tell Mary Rockwell's doctor to let him make the trip without her. As Solomon puts it "Rockwell was tethered to an alcoholic whose drinking made her petulant and critical of his work." He couldn't take it.

In addition to the emotional toll, the therapy and hospitalizations were expensive. So - in order to pay the bills - the famous artist grudgingly took on advertising work, Solomon says, "including a campaign for Kellogg's Corn Flakes"(291). The more that money was an issue for him, the less art there was in Rockwell's work.

As much as Mary Rockwell's death in 1959 was painful for her husband, he married again. And his third wife, Molly, was more supportive of his work, encouraging him to leave the constricting Saturday Evening Post to work for Look magazine, where he had the opportunity to deal with topics like civil rights and space exploration.

In 1972 several Stockbridge Indians from Wisconsin - led by Dorothy Davids and her sister, Bernice Miller - made the trip to Stockbridge, Massachusetts where they were invited to a party at the Rockwells' house. In an e-mail sent to me about ten years ago, Dot Davids reported that they really liked Molly Rockwell a lot. It seems their impression of the artist himself was that he was sincere but not very outgoing. Nevertheless, at the time he had started a painting that depicted Konkapot and John Sergeant sitting in Sergeant's study. So you can imagine how excited Norman Rockwell was to learn that one of his Native guests, Tina Williams, was a direct descendant of Konkapot!

With many accomplishments and honors, Norman Rockwell died in 1978. However, the painting of Konkapot and John Sergeant was never finished.

 

Printed Source:

Solomon, Deborah. American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell. 2013.

 

Links:

The Norman Rockwell Museum (at Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

The Norman Rockwell Museum of Vermont

Norman Rockwell page on Biography.com

Norman Rockwell archives at the Saturday Evening Post

Online Smithsonian article about Rockwell

Non-Indian Residents of Stockbridge, MA: Erik Erikson

When he was growing up in Germany, Erik Erikson was Erik Homberger. He was brought up to think that his stepfather, Theodor Homberger, was his biological father. Young Erik must have been confused at some point: since both of his parents were Jewish, how did he get a head of Scandinavian blond, hair?

When he was a young man, Erik Homberger changed his name to Erik Erikson. Symbolically, he was claiming to be his own father. Erikson was a psychoanalyst and author. He coined the term identity crisis.

Before mental health counseling was a common thing, Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis. Since scientific methods and standards still hadn't been established back then, Freud managed, for some time, to claim on one hand that psychoanalysis was a science, while, on the other hand, making it into something like a religion with himself as the high priest. Freud had more than his share of followers. Psychoanalytic practitioners for some years were all medical doctors who had undergone analysis either on Freud's own couch or the couch of one of his followers.

But Freud eventually lost his paternalistic hold over psychoanalysis and talk therapy. Starting with Carl Jung, many of his followers broke away from his quasi-religious organization. I'm speculating now, but perhaps that is why, later in his life, Freud advocated for "lay-analysts," that is, he wanted those who were not medical doctors to be allowed into training to become psychoanalysts. (Maybe Freud was hoping lay analysts would be more loyal to his system.)

Erik Erikson was teaching art when he met Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter. Erikson went on to become probably the most famous lay analyst. One of the criticisms of Freud, the master, is that he developed a "theory of psychosexual development" with five stages, without ever actually studying children or adolescents. But Anna Freud studied children and adolescents. For Anna Freud, sexuality was much less important in human development. Erik Erikson was in that same camp. He adapted Sigmund Freud's developmental stages and called them stages of "psychosocial development."

 
[caption id="attachment_7185" align="aligncenter" width="599"] The pioneering mental hospital that brought Erik Erikson to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.[/caption]

After laying out those stages in his most famous book, Childhood and Society, Erikson left Berkeley, California and moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Deborah Solomon, in her book American Mirror (2013, 288), says that Erikson was lured to Stockbridge's pioneering mental hospital, the Austen Riggs Center, with "the promise of a light clinical load and ample time to spend writing his next book."

 

Bill Mason's Waterwalker: The Best Documentary Ever?

About fifteen years ago, a canoeing friend of mine introduced me to Bill Mason's extraordinary (1984) film, Waterwalker. I'm sure that Mason is best known as a canoeist, and he was a very good one, but, as the film shows, he was also a very gifted artist: he painted with knives instead of brushes.



Maybe I am pushing the envelope of my subject matter with this blogpost, but something I didn't remember until I watched Waterwalker again last night, is that Bill Mason sprinkled some religion into his films. (He quoted a passage from Job in Waterwalker.) But let me emphasize this is a documentary film, it doesn't get "preachy." All the verbal material is only fully understood in the context of the spectacular visuals of Lake Superior's coast and the rivers that feed into it (the footage includes canoeing action, the turbulence of rapids and falls, and a fair amount of wildlife).

Mason says that, at one point in his life, he glamorized the voyaguers (the French canoe fiends that transported furs and trade goods). But he stopped being a fan of the voyaguers when he realized how harmful the fur trade was to Native peoples - often known as "First Nations" in Canada.

With that said, even I, a big fan of Waterwalker, had to suspect that Bill Mason didn't quite "get" Indians. If he was aware of the issues and controversies important to the Native people of his time, it isn't in the film. In Inheriting a Canoe Paddle, Masao Dean criticizes Waterwalker and Bill Mason for a lack of awareness about the First Nations.

American Indians are not a vanished race of environmentalists. That point is well taken. Maybe it is the one flaw of what could otherwise be known as "by far the BEST documentary of its kind EVER," as one YouTube commenter put it recently.

[caption id="attachment_7162" align="aligncenter" width="607"] These pictographs from the rocky shore of Lake Superior's Agawa Bay appear in Waterwalker.[/caption]

That's right, Waterwalker can be freely viewed from your computer screen and I think you'll find it is more than worth the 86 minutes of your time.

However, since Waterwalker was co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada, you may want to use their site to access the film.

What was the American Indian Population in 1492?

What was the population of Turtle Island (North America) in 1492?

The answer is.... We don't know.

But that isn't for a lack of trying. No doubt learned scholars have made estimates.

And they vary widely.

 

Russell Thornton, a professor of Anthropology, includes a chapter called "American Indian Population in 1492," in his book,  American Indian Holocaust and Survival. According to Thornton

Overall, there seems little relationship between the types of data and methodologies used in estimating American Indian population sizes and the resulting estimates. Competent scholars have used the same basic data and the same basic techniques to yield very high or very low estimated populations (page 34).

Thornton's research led him to conclude that it wasn't the sets of data nor the statistical research methods used that determined a population estimate, but rather, as he put it, "the psychologies of the scholars themselves." He determined that scholars "holding the idea of elaborate and extensive societies will...generally hold the idea also of large numbers of people"(35).

Another factor had to do with the scholars' view of history after contact with whites. Thornton says that "if we consider history to have been especially destructive to aboriginal people of the Western Hemisphere, then we assume larger aboriginal numbers than if we consider subsequent history to have been "kinder"(35).

Another aspect of the researchers' "psychology" is simply that they were aware of the numbers coming from other researchers and so the population estimates also correspond - at least to some extent - with changing trends, for a decade or two they might tend toward high numbers and for the next ten or twenty years following that, the estimates would tend to be low.

So I'm not going to bother to give you any numbers at all (not in this post, at least). The best answer still is that we simply don't know how many Indians lived on Turtle Island in 1492.

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What was the Sixty Years' War?

You know the Cold War, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror, but have you heard of the Sixty Years' War?

Is the Sixty Years' War completely "made-up"?

Well, it consists of several very real military conflicts punctuated by periods of varying levels of tension among a number of groups of people. The Sixty Years' War was simply a power strugle for the Great Lakes. However, to bolster the argument that it was "made-up," let me point out that during the actual 60 years of 1754 to 1814, nobody ever spoke of the "Sixty Years' War."

Instead, the term "Sixty Years' War" was coined by modern academic historians.

Let's go back to ancient Greece when the historian Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War. It was a conflict between the Athenian and Spartan Empires from 431 to 404 B.C. As David Curtis Skaggs writes in his overview of the Sixty Years' War (page 1), the Peloponnesian War "consisted of a series of subconflicts, interrupted by shaky peace, political intrigue, and policy decisions." So Skaggs' reading of Thucydides led to the insight that something similar to the Peloponnesian War occurred on this continent. As Skaggs tells it, a

broader reading of the great Greek historian...brought me to see the multifaceted struggle to control the great freshwater lakes and their basins... not as unconnected events, but rather as part of a broader sequence of episodes involving the Native Americans and Europeans of French, British, and Creole backgrounds for control of the finest bodies of fresh water in the world.

Complicated stuff.

To help you wrap your mind around the Sixty Years' War, it may help to know the names of the conflicts. I'm sure you're familiar with at least some of them.

1. The French and Indian War
2. Pontiac's Rebellion
3. Lord Dunmore's War
4. Frontier Skirmishes associated with the American Revolution
5. The Northwest Indian War (Miami Confederacy vs. The United States)
6. The War of 1812 (western theater)

So, was the Sixty Years' War an important piece of American history?  ....Yes!

I think we're onto something here.

Source:
Skaggs, David Curtis, and Larry L. Nelson. The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.

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