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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
The Revolutionary War is ordinarily presented as a conflict
exclusively between colonists and the British, fought along the
northern Atlantic seacoast. This important work recounts the tragic
events on the forgotten Western front of the American Revolution--a
war fought against and ultimately won by Native America. The
Natives, primarily the Iroquois League and the Ohio Union, are
erroneously presented in history texts as "allies" (or lackeys) of
the British, but Native America was working from its own internally
generated agenda: to prevent settlers from invading the Old
Northwest. Native America won the war in the West, holding the land
west and north of the Allegheny-Ohio River systems. While the
British may have awarded these lands to the colonists in the Treaty
of Paris, the Native Americans did not concur. Throughout the war,
the unwavering goal of the Revolutionary Army, under George
Washington, and their associated settler militias was to break the
power of the Iroquois League, which had successfully held off
invasion for the preceding two centuries, and the newly formed Ohio
Union. To destroy the Natives in the way of land seizure,
Washington authorized a series of rampages intended to destroy the
League and the Union by starvation. Food, livestock, homes, and
trees were destroyed, first in the New York breadbaskets, then in
the Ohio granaries--spreading famine across Native lands. Uncounted
thousands of Natives perished from New York to Pennsylvania to
Ohio. This book tells how, in the wake of the massive assaults, the
Natives held back the American onslaught.
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