Shirley W. Dunn

This book is packed full of facts and information. The author examines records from New York State's Hudson Valley, a major destination for settlers heading from Europe to our continent from the early 1600s to the present day. Dunn starts with the facts and then brings the information to life by explaining the meaning of the documents, sharing right away what takes researchers many years to learn. Not everyone will consider the legal records to be the most interesting part of the book, but the records can tell you what “history”, written through the filter of bias, cannot. Through the deeds we see that the women were the sellers and conveyors of Mohican land and down through the years we see genealogies, sons and grandsons of earlier women and men .
Maps and additional writings by contemporaries such as Daniel Denton and Adriaen Van Der Donck help the author to flesh out the picture of everyday life for the Mohicans and surrounding tribes. The author doesn't just leave it there, though; she explains how these aspects of life came to gradually change and the devastating eventual outcome.
We learn about the Mohican homes, their food, their council meetings and their political and social structure but in an interesting way. We also learn about maps and existing overland travel routes which can completely amaze any present-day travelers going from one place to another in the region, as we follow trails that are now highways, the same routes being at least 300 years old.

Dunn's most significant contribution to our understanding of our geographical and genetic forebears could be her tracing the events and what happened to the Native Americans. Through these records, we don't just skip over history as we have received it in school: (When the settlers arrived the Indians were there and then they were gone). We see the introduction of well-meaning but culture-destroying church missionaries, the creeping disease of alcoholism, the local natives driven out by loss of their land although they did their best to adapt to a changing economy and changing world. Ever-increasing mountains of debt precipitated by purchases of alcohol, food, weapons, implements and farming provisions pressured them to sell their land rights (which they may or may not have been adequately compensated for), and move on, away from the area. This impacted present-day states of New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, the latter two names being of Algonquian origin, Connecticut being Mohican Algonquian and Massachusetts being Wampanoag Algonquian.
Readers can be forgiven if they skip the deeds and don’t have the patience to dig through but reading the author’s narrative is in itself fascinating, well worth the time.… (mais)