I just finished the historical novel, "Bone Rattler" by Eloit Pattison. The setting is Colonial America during the French and Indian War (Seven Years War to Europeans).
The hero is a Scotsman who was a British convict shipped to the colonies to be indentured for seven years to a royal landowner. The author (who has written many novels about a
former Chinese police inspector, set in modern modern Tibet under Chinese rule)Pattison compares the struggle the Iroquois nation had with colonial British rule with the Scottish struggle against England. In his book, British rangers of Scottish descent are falsely persecuted by regular British army officers and some join forces with the Iroquois warriors.
In the
"Author's Notes' of Bone Rattler, he says:
Quote:
During the late 1750's a peculiar complaint began arising from officers in the British forts north of Albany in the New York colony. They questioned the practice of allowing Iroquois allies to bivouac near their combat garrisons due to the unruly behavior that resulted when the Indians mingled with the Highland Scot troops-who seemed, by army standards, little more than heathens themselves. The bonds between Scot and Iroquois that anchor the plot of this novel are indeed not a novelist's fancy but rooted in historic fact: for a few years in the mid-18th century these two extraordinary cultures briefly and sporadically overlapped. In retrospect the connection should come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the two peoples. The Highlanders and Iroquois were both steeped in warrior traditions, shared a rich heritage of storytelling, chafed against authority, and were each in their own way deeply spiritual. A particular headache for British officers-and a particular delight for those of us with Scottish blood gazing back -- was the tendency of certain Highlanders and Iroquois to perform wardances together before engagements.
Where such bonds formed between Scot and Iroquois, they may well have been nurtured by a mutual recognition that both their cultures were under siege by the same forces. They were living in turbulent times, years of unprecedented change that were altering their ways of life, and those of many others, forever. The period in which this book is set marked in a very real sense the beginning of the modern era. Science and literature were blossoming. The proliferation of printing presses had begun to connect and empower people, politically and culturally, in ways never before known. The common man had begun to discover his own identity, with profound implications for society. The first conflict that can truly be called a world war had begun, ignited in the forests of Pennsylvania by a young officer who was later to play the leading role in the American Revolution. These years became the pintel upon which many events of the following centuries swung.
_________________
In Christ,
Jim B
I will consider your position if stated with firm, well-thought-out, quiet reasoning. Hateful diatribe, ad hominem attacks and shouted rhetoric don't impress.
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