Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast

Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast. By Guy Chet. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. xx, 207 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 1-55849-366-2. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 1-55849-382-4.)

Guy Chet began his research for this short yet provocative book hoping to trace the Americanization of New Englanders' military tactics. Looking at battles from 1620 through the Seven Years' War, Chet found that the evidence did not support the popular and academic orthodoxy. Instead of discarding their military doctrine upon discovering that it was ineffective in the American context, Anglo-American and British military forces clung to European conventions as best they could. This persistence paid dividends when, in the Seven Years' War, they prevailed over the French-Indian alliance.

To determine whether combatants followed European doctrine or a new American...