Böcker av John L. Moore

When the American Revolution began in 1775, neither the British nor the Americans wanted to involve the native tribes. "This is a family quarrel between us and Old England," the U.S. Congress told the Iroquois Confederacy. "You Indians are not concerned in it."The Indians didn't want to take sides. "We will not suffer either the English or Americans to march an army through our country," Guyasuta, the ranking Iroquois chief in the Ohio River Valley, declared at Pittsburgh in 1776.The natives' neutrality didn't last another year."The western Indians are united against us," Brigadier General Edward Hand said in September 1777. The Outposts tells how Hand led a mostly militia force from Fort Pitt into Indian Country in February 1778. When his troops met friendly Delawares in the woods, they "were so impetuous that I could not prevent their killing the man and one of the women," he said.John L. Moore's nonfiction book draws on first-person accounts to chronicle these events.Late 1778 saw the Americans erect two forts-Fort McIntosh at present-day Beaver, Pa., and Fort Laurens at Bolivar, Ohio-along a key trail linking Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit, 300 miles to the northwest. The construction was ordered by General Lachlan McIntosh, a Georgian who didn't appreciate the severity of northern winters.Delaware Indians, still friendly toward the United States, welcomed Fort Laurens, but the British and their native allies realized the outpost would support an American march against Detroit. When hostile warriors prevented McIntosh from shipping provisions to the fort, soldiers in the garrison began to starve. Hungry soldiers "washed their moccasins and broiled them for food, and broiled strips of old dried hides," an elderly veteran recalled decades later.

As the Delaware Indians moved west through Pennsylvania during the 1700s, they carried with them tribal memories of the day they first met people from Europe. Their ancestors had lived along the Atlantic Ocean, and, according to tradition, which a missionary eventually wrote down, a group of Indian men in canoes had ventured out into New York Harbor to fish. Suddenly they saw a strange object floating in the ocean far to the east. When it got very close, they saw that it was a large floating house with people on it.There are remarkable similarities between this legend and journal entries written in September 1609 by an officer of Henry Hudson's ship, the "Half Moon," as it sailed into the harbor and up the Hudson River. Author John L. Moore explores the differences and similarities of the European and Native American versions of this fateful meeting.A work of non-fiction, "Rivers, Raiders, and Renegades" provides colorful details of the 1600s, an obscure era in colonial history. Among the many people it depicts is Etienne Brule, a young Frenchman who lived with the Indians after arriving in Canada in 1608 and who in 1615 became the first European to travel the entire length of the Susquehanna River;Moore draws upon written observations of early colonists who described the Native Americans they encountered. Peter Lindestrom, a Delaware River colonist, reported that Indians occasionally cut themselves all over their bodies, then rubbed special ointments into the wounds so that "blue streaks" remained when the wounds healed. This made "the savages appear entirely striped and streaky," Lindestrom said. Another Delaware colonist, Johann Printz, said, "They walk naked with only a piece of cloth ... tied around their hips." In the Hudson Valley, Dutch colonist Isaack De Rasiere reported: "In the wintertime they usually wear a dressed deerskin; some have a bear's skin about the body; some a coat of scales; some a covering made of turkey feathers."The descendants of these natives eventually passed through Pennsylvania as they migrated farther west to the Ohio River Valley or north to central and western New York. These stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Hudson, and Susquehanna rivers.

Histories can be two-dimensional; these contain information strung along timelines. Other histories are three-dimensional, fleshing the basics out with descriptions and explanations. And then there are the four-dimensional histories, best savored slowly. 'Pioneers, Prisoners, and Peace Pipes' falls in this last category.John L. Moore's four-dimensional tales draws the reader into a world long gone in such a way that the reader gets lost in a distant place - with no desire to leave. This master story teller has discovered hidden eddies of history. He artfully weaves original source material into accounts that still touch the heart. There is the couple coming home to find their children kidnapped and their home ransacked ... There is a husband searching for a lost wife, and - years later - finding and being reunited with her. There is a 16-year old man/boy lost in a military adventure, captured by the enemy, and spilling all he knows during polite but businesslike interrogations. The settings are all over Pennsylvania; the times are the late 1700s. All true stories. And if these stories all seem weirdly contemporary; it's simply because people have always been - people.Readers will have their favorites in this collection of 11 true American historical vignettes. Among mine: 'Boy soldier nearly starves in the woods' ... This tale starts, "Michael La Chauvignerie was a 16-year-old French soldier who left his home in Canada during the summer of 1756, bound for the Ohio Country. Michael didn't know it as he left Montreal and sailed up the St. Lawrence River, but he had embarked on the first leg of a prolonged and complicated adventure that would take him to Philadelphia and, ultimately, to the Caribbean Sea." Maybe you could stop reading at this point - but I had to continue. And rest of La Chauvignerie's true story delivers!Elsewhere in "Pioneers, Prisoners, and Peace Pipes" the words of chastened but wise Ackowanothie ring true today, almost 250 years after they were uttered: "Your nation always showed an eagerness to settle our lands. Cunning as they were, they always encouraged a number of poor people to settle upon our lands. We protested against it several times, but without any redress or help. We pitied the poor people; we did not care to make use of force, and indeed some of those people were very good people, and as hospitable as we Indians ... but after all we lost our hunting ground, for where one of those people settled, like pigeons, a thousand more would settle, so that we at last offered to sell it ... and so it went on 'til we at last jumped over (the) Allegheny hills and settled on the waters of Ohio. Here we thought ourselves happy." Poor deluded Delawares!Good history, in my opinion, makes one think. And think. And think. It also makes one feel. And emotion is the secret of "Pioneers, Prisoners and Peace Pipes." Moore brings one face to face not just with facts (as important as they are), but with a larger and richer four-dimensional reality infused with feelings. He gently reminds us that humans without emotions have never existed, and that history without that dimension is not history, but simply a cheap cardboard imitation. "Pioneers, Prisoners and Peace Pipes" is four-dimensional work crafted with love. Enjoy it!Thomas J. Brucia is a bibliophile who lives in Houston, Texas. His favorite subjects include European and Asian history. Many of his reviews appear on Amazon.com

Author John L. Moore serves up a miscellany of fascinating depictions of obscure but authentic people and situations in this non-fiction book about the Pennsylvania Frontier between 1743 and 1778.We meet Sassoonan, an elderly Delaware Indian chief who lived at the Forks of the Susquehanna River. His position made him custodian of the tribal records, which consisted of belts of wampum. Wampum was also a form of currency, and Sassoonan regularly used this wampum to buy rum from the traders who brought it to town.While visiting an Indian town on an island in the Susquehanna River, the Rev. David Brainerd held his Bible as he hid in the bushes, out of sight of the bonfire and the Native Americans who danced around it. The missionary believed that the Indians were attempting to summon Satan and, as he later wrote in his journal, he intended to "spoil their sport."It was January 1756 as General Benjamin Franklin led a column of infantry soldiers and mounted troops into the Blue Ridge Mountains north of Bethlehem and Easton to erect a series of log forts along strategic forest paths. Hostile Indians watched Franklin's force as the men erected the stockade walls. Ever curious, Franklin himself used his watch to see how long it took two of his men to fell a pine tree.Mary Jameson was a 15-year-old frontier farm girl when she helped her mother cook breakfast over the hearth in the family's log house one cold morning in April 1758. The Jamesons don't know it, but by lunchtime their cabin would be on fire, and all but two of the eight members of the Jameson family would be the prisoners of an Indian raiding party.WHAT OTHERS SAY: "Moore's tales bear fascinating titles. Who could fail to be intrigued by "Camp Followers Displease Militia Chaplain," or by "Benjamin Franklin Leads Militia Into Bethlehem," or by "Chaplain's Rum Draws Troops To Daily Worship"?Some of the descriptions Moore takes from his original sources are fascinating, even 250 years later. For example, Benjamin Franklin observes: The Indians "dug holes in the ground about three feet in diameter, and somewhat deeper. ... They had made small fires in the bottoms of the holes, and we observed among the weeds and grass the prints of their bodies, made by their laying all around, with their legs hanging down in the holes to keep their feet warm. ... This kind of fire, so managed, could not discover them, either by its light, flame, sparks, or even smoke." What an image!One unusual tale is "Even Indians Become Lost, Hungry In Forest." This is the chilling story of an Indian mother who, with her three children, was trapped in an early blizzard in 1739 on a mountain near present-day Lock Haven while traveling the Great Shamokin Path. The gruesome details were recorded by Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, and Moore passes them on to the reader without comment. Thomas J. Brucia, Houston, Texas.Bibliophile, outdoorsman and book reviewer

One Sunday in 1782, white vigilantes suddenly appeared at a camp of Delaware Indians on an island in the Allegheny River near Fort Pitt in western Pennsylvania. Guns blazing, they attacked, killing several Indians and neutralizing U.S. soldiers assigned to guard them.These Delawares were active allies of the American army. Two held the rank of captain, and others had served as scouts. The chief, Colonel Killbuck, escaped by swimming.The title of John L. Moore's nonfiction book, "Murder at Killbuck Island," comes from the true story of these killings. It is among the most obscure of the many unprovoked attacks that Native Americans suffered at the hands of white people.The book is the fifth in Moore's ongoing Revolutionary Pennsylvania Series. The account of the attack on Killbuck's camp is one of seven dealing with various aspects of the Revolutionary War. Others tell how: Church bells rang to signal Benjamin Franklin's return from London in May 1775. Hundreds of Philadelphians rode out to meet John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and John Adams, coming from Massachusetts to attend the Continental Congress.Pennsylvania soldiers mutinied in their winter camp at Morristown, N.J., in January 1781. Ten months later, they were in the American army's front lines at Yorktown, Va.A wealthy landowner on the Susquehanna River's West Branch wanted Hessian POWs to build a stone fort to replace a wooden defense burned by pro-British Indians.Pennsylvania militia officers confiscated the guns of Loyalists, then redistributed them to soldiers marching off the fight the British.Tories in Buck County robbed tax collectors whose revenues financed the local militia. After the war, several fled to Canada. At least two were hanged.

Jack Armstrong died violently along the Juniata River in early 1744.Armstrong was a rough-and-tumble frontier trader whose sharp business practices antagonized one Indian too many. He and two men who worked for him traveled into the woods in early 1744 and never came out again. Word soon crossed the frontier that all three had been murdered. Obscure, but richly detailed documents tell how and why Iroquois Indians living along the Susquehanna River at present-day Sunbury developed evidence that exposed the Native Americans involved in Armstrong's murder.John L. Moore's nonfiction book contains true stories of Armstrong and other real people caught up in the struggles that took place all along the Pennsylvania frontier throughout the late 1600s and 1700s. The stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers.Other chapters tell how: The Philadelphia jury in Margaret Mattson's 1683 witchcraft trail delivered a split verdict. She was acquitted of bewitching her neighbors' cows, but found guilty of being known as a witch. Presiding over the trial was William Penn, who let Margaret go home after her husband and son posted a bond for her "good behavior."Moravian missionaries who traveled along the Susquehanna River's West and North Branches during a famine in 1748 found many Indians sick with smallpox and suffering from starvation. The people in one native town were boiling tree bark for food. In another village they were cooking grass.Early in the French & Indian War, an influential Iroquois chief known as "The Belt of Wampum" urged Pennsylvania officials to build a fort on the Susquehanna River at the native town called Shamokin, present-day Sunbury. "Such Indians as continue true to you want a place to come to and to live in security," The Belt said in early 1756.Frances Slocum, a small girl kidnapped by Indians from her home along the Susquehanna River during the America Revolution, spent most of her adult life as a Miami Indian. In 1839, her brother Joseph and his daughters traveled from Pennsylvania to Indiana to visit her. They traveled by stage coach, canal boat and horse-drawn railroad during their 19-day journey west.Anecdotes throughout the book describe how Native Americans and Europeans hunted bears, ate bear meat, and used bearskins for blankets and mattresses.

As he traveled across the Pennsylvania Frontier in 1743, naturalist John Bartram didn't know what to expect when he accepted an invitation to spend the night in the cabin of a white man who traded goods for furs with the Indians. The cabin was near the native town of Shamokin (present-day Sunbury) along the Susquehanna River. "About midnight, the Indians came and called up him and his squaw," Bartram wrote later. "She sold the Indians rum. ... Being quickly intoxicated, men and women began first to sing and then dance round the fire."Bartram is one of many early Pennsylvanians that people this colorful non-fiction work. Others include Conrad Weiser, the Pennsylvania Colony's Indian agent; William Penn, the colony's visionary founder; Madame Montour, an interpreter who was the daughter of an Algonquin mother and French father; and Major General Edward Braddock, who led British troops against the French army in the Ohio River Valley.Author John L. Moore raises and answers many questions about who the frontiersmen and natives were and what they did. What was William Penn's colony like in its early days? How did the Lenni Lenape Indians living in Penn's colony obtain their food? What did they eat? How did they get along with Penn, and how did Penn get along with them? Why did Penn's sons recruit athletic young men to walk the boundary of land the Lenape weren't especially interested in selling?These true stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers. They chronicle many aspects of a nearly forgotten past.The Iroquois, for example, claimed the land along the Susquehanna and its tributaries by right of conquest of the Susquehannocks. They regarded the Juniata River Valley as prime hunting land. During the late 1740s they became distressed to see white settlers cross the Susquehanna and begin to build homesteads in territory they hadn't sold and had intended to reserve for themselves.In May 1750 a posse of magistrates and lawmen sent by Gov. James Hamilton rode up the Juniata and began evicting the squatters. Iroquois representatives accompanied them and forced the Pennsylvanians to set fire to the cabins of the homesteaders.Eventually, the Indians left the Susquehanna Valley. White settlers who subsequently ventured into the upper Susquehanna during the 1780s came into a region that was still remote and desolate. The forests and fields of Pennsylvania still teemed with game, and one of these whites, Philip Tome, became a professional hunter. He let his dogs chase deer, used torchlight to hunt at night, and kept written records. One year, "every time I saw a bear, I marked it down, and in a month I counted 43," Tome said.

In April 1753, frontier missionary David Zeisberger prepared for a month-long voyage up the Susquehanna River's North Branch by walking along the river bank at present-day Sunbury and selecting a suitable tree to fashion into a dugout canoe.Zeisberger and another missionary felled the tree, then spent two days hollowing its trunk into the shape of a canoe, before setting sail. A month later they came upon a fleet of 25 canoes carrying Nanticoke Indians upriver. "As far as the eye could reach, you could see one canoe behind the other along the Susquehanna," the missionaries wrote.Zeisberger is one of many real characters who people the pages of this non-fiction book about the Pennsylvania frontier. Others include Shikellamy, the Iroquois half-king at Shamokin; Conrad Weiser, the Pennsylvania colony's Indian agent; Teedyuscung, king of the Delawares; Benjamin Franklin, builder of frontier forts; and a Delaware war chief known as Shingas the Terrible.Author John L. Moore used journals, letters, official reports and other first-person accounts to portray the frontiersmen and the events and conflicts in which they were involved.The stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers.WHAT OTHERS SAY: "Moore brings us an engaging treatment of Gen. Edward Braddock's ill-fated campaign in 1755 to oust the French from the Ohio Valley. His account gives us a fresh perspective of something often lost in the histories of this march through the wilderness - the troubles the British army experienced with logistics and their erstwhile Native American allies."Moore includes a later description by Moravian missionary John Heckewelder of how horses' hooves made 'dismal music' as they walked over the unburied bones of Braddock's soldiers. But Moore's book is overall about a lost world of encounters in the forest between the colonial Americans and the Iroquois and Delaware - the tree paintings along trails and the travails of a Seneca given the English name of Captain Newcastle. It's a world worth visiting." Robert B. Swift, Author of "The Mid-Appalachian Frontier: A Guide to Historic Sites of the French and Indian War.""One can't go wrong with this work. It's the kind of tale one might read aloud to one's children out in the woods at evenings while huddled around a campfire." Thomas J. Brucia, Houston, Texas, bibliophile, outdoorsman and book reviewer."As someone who despised history classes in high school and practically fell asleep during college history courses, I must admit that I immensely enjoyed this fascinating read." Catherine Felegi, Cranford, N.J., Writer, editor, and blogger at: cafelegi.wordpress.com.

"The author uses journals, letters, official reports and other first-person accounts to portray the frontiersmen and the events and conflicts in which they were involved. The stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers"--From back cover.

Barbara Leininger and Marie LeRoy were teenage girls living along Penns Creek in central Pennsylvania in 1755 when an Indian war party captured them and carried them off to western Pennsylvania. This occurred early in the French & Indian War. For several years, the teenagers lived as Delaware Indians. Sometimes they had little to eat, and " ... we were forced to live on acorns, roots, grass and bark," they said later.After three years, they escaped from their captors and fled on foot across the forests of Ohio and Pennsylvania, eventually reaching the safety of the British fort at Pittsburgh.The first-person narrative they dictated to a Philadelphia newspaper after their 1759 escape was one of many first-person documents that author John L. Moore uses to tell the true stories of real people in this non-fiction collection of articles that is part of the Frontier Pennsylvania Series.Other accounts in the book tell how and why Native Americans took the scalps of their foes, kept written records of their wartime exploits, and employed fire as a weapon when hunting for deer.The stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers.WHAT OTHERS SAY: "The people of 18th century frontier Pennsylvania - settlers, soldiers, and Indians alike - march across these pages in a human drama that we can understand, but more importantly feel almost 300 years later. Moore lets the actors describe themselves in their own words: the misunderstandings, conflicts, family tragedies, deaths, diseases, hunger, wars, and the simply mundane business of their everyday lives. Our storyteller takes just as much care in describing the Indians' daily slog, quarrels, family life, customs and mores as he does their sometimes friends - and sometimes rivals - the European settlers. Both groups formed intertwined threads in a single frontier web."When he describes a famous campaign in the French & Indian War, Moore deftly uses his sources to make General Braddock's doomed expedition come to life. Incidents of friendly fire, frightened European soldiers used to fighting in open spaces but never in woods, slow progress as an army builds a road (!) into the mountains - mile by mile - are all described as if patiently carved into oak to make woodcut prints." Thomas J. Brucia, Houston, Texas.Bibliophile, outdoorsman and book reviewer

A wintry December 1776 forced General Washington's army to struggle against the ice, snow, sleet, and wind as well as against Hessian and British soldiers.John L. Moore's nonfiction book draws on first-person accounts to chronicle these struggles. In the weeks prior to Washington's victory over the Hessians at Trenton: Continental regiments coming south from Albany, New York, to join Washington in Pennsylvania's Bucks County ran into a severe snowstorm as they marched across northern New Jersey.Militia troops from Dover, Delaware, marched through snow to join Washington in eastern Pennsylvania. En route, they met a congressman fleeing Philadelphia who predicts that Washington may soon need "to obtain the best terms (of surrender) that could be had from the enemy."A Philadelphia militia company, ordered to make a night march, "hadn't marched far before it began to rain and snow," the sergeant said. When the men reached their objective, they were "as wet as rain could make us and cold to numbness."Washington's offensive against Trenton began on a "fearfully cold and raw" Christmas night on the Delaware River's Pennsylvania side with "a snow storm setting in," an officer said."The wind is northeast and beats in the faces of the men," the officer said. "It will be a terrible night for the soldiers who have no shoes." Even so, the soldiers crossed into New Jersey, then marched nine miles to Trenton.Downriver, hundreds of General John Cadwalader's militiamen also managed to reach New Jersey even though, as Colonel Joseph Reed reported, "the ice began to drive with such force and in such quantities as threatened many boats with absolute destruction." Cadwalader called off the offensive when his men couldn't get the cannons ashore.