Content area
Full Text
The Iroquois in the War of 1812. By Carl Benn. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1998. xiv + 272 pp., introduction, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index.)
The League of the Iroquois emerged from the internecine turmoil of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the Lower Great Lakes region of North America. When Europeans began spreading into the region, the League became the foundation of a Native American political confederacy that was comprised first of five, later six, nations that spoke Northern Iroquoian languages. Their compact matrilineal village societies were home bases for Iroquois men who spent much of their time alternating between war and diplomacy before and during the colonial period. Competing Dutch, English, and French enterprises could not afford to ignore the Iroquois, and the Iroquois quickly learned that their own interests were not necessarily identical with those of any of the European powers.
Iroquois war parties destroyed many neighboring nations in the seventeenth century, extirpating, dispersing, or absorbing them in turn. In the eighteenth century they were major players in the wars between the French and the English. Various Iroquois communities were allied to one side or the other until the French were driven off...