O'Toole White Savage

William Johnson and the Invention of America
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31941-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten

A dramatic, exciting and tragic book about the Irish fur trapper who held the fate of America and the British Empire in his hands. William Johnson began life as a poor Irish Catholic peasant. After converting to Protestantism, he emigrated to America where he became the leading fur trader in the British colony and one of its richest men. He also 'went native', marrying an Indian woman and adopting the religion of her tribe, the Iroquois. When war broke out between the French and English, Johnson held the fate of the British Empire in his hands. If the Indians fought with the French, the British were doomed. A fascinating historical biography of this adventurous man, whose reinvention in the New World made him the first modern American.

Fintan O'Toole is one of Ireland's most respected and controversial political and cultural commentators, and an acclaimed biographer and critic. His books include White Savage, A Traitor's Kiss,Meanwhile Back at the Ranch, the number one bestseller Ship of Fools, which Terry Eagleton called 'a brilliant polemic', and its sequel Enough is Enough.He lives in Dublin and is a columnist for the Irish Times.

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Toole, Fintan

Leseproben

1

Tears, Throat, Heart

One thing leads to another. Causes have their effects. But the wind blowing on one continent may ultimately be caused by a tiny shift in the air over another. The fall and rise of the wave may be influenced by the unperceived motion of a fish. Events may be connected by broken threads whose traces form strange, irrational patterns. Otherwise, the lives of an old Irishman and a young American Indian woman could not intersect in a way that would be, to both of them, inexplicable.

In January 1763 an obscure old Catholic man died on a quiet farm twenty miles west of Dublin and was buried amid the sonorous cadences of Latin prayers, the opulent aroma of incense and a haze of smoke from guttering candles wafting around his coffin. Christopher Johnson had lived for seventy-nine years in the lush pastures of County Meath, most of them as a tenant of his wife’s family.1 His public insignificance was not entirely a matter of choice. Throughout his adult life, people like him – idolaters and potential traitors who looked kindly on the claims of exiled pretenders to the throne of Britain and Ireland – were barred by law from public life, the professions and the armed forces. If he had ever aspired to glory, he had soon learned that such foolish dreams were incompatible with his place in history.

When he was still a child, his class of people – the respectable, well-to-do native Catholics of Ireland – had imagined for a while that their hour had come again, that the accession to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland of their co-religionist King James II heralded their resurrection. In what had seemed an almost miraculous deliverance, a Catholic king had been crowned and their hopes of being saved from oppression had been made flesh. They thought they would rise again and reclaim the lands and status that had been taken from them by the Protestant British colonists who had come to power in Ireland over the course of the seventeenth century. And then James had been deposed in a British coup and replaced by his impeccably Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. For the last time, two men who had been crowned King of Britain fought a civil war for the throne, and this time Ireland was the battlefield.

As a little boy, Christopher Johnson had watched his older kinsmen ride out in all their pride and hope to fight in grand battles for King James, one of them on the River Boyne near his home. He had watched them ride back again in tatters from bloody disasters or from captivity, and the Jacobite cause gradually subside into a broken dream. He had learned how to live with the slow death of a defeated culture, how to keep his head down, how to hold his tongue, how to move amid undercurrents, how to survive. That he died at such a late age, and in such comfortable obscurity, was a testament to his mastery of those lessons.

Christopher Johnson’s death was of no concern to anyone in Ireland beyond his family and his neighbours; but 2,000 miles away, across the vast Atlantic and through the dense forests of upstate New York, the word spread and was heard with great solemnity. It eventually reached Oneida Lake, about twenty miles north of present-day Syracuse, and the Tuscarora village at Oquaga, which was off the usual track along which messages travelled through the territories of the Iroquois nations.

In early June 1763, after a journey eastwards of about 100 miles, six young warriors from the village arrived at the grand new house of Christopher Johnson’s son William about halfway between Albany and Utica, in the present-day city of Johnstown. They were gauche and nervous, hoping that they could remember the proper ceremony that would convey their condolences on the death of Christopher Johnson. Having fortified themselves with a dram of rum and a pipe of tobacco, they formally addressed William Johnson and asked for his forgiveness, ‘as we are but Youngsters’, for ‘any mistakes which for want of knowledge we may make’.2

They spoke the Three Bare Words which banished the pall of grief from the son’s body: ‘Tears, throat, heart.’ In their foundation myth, these were the words first spoken by the legendary Mohawk chief Ayonhwathah (Hiawatha) when he was stricken with grief at the death of his three daughters. The waters of a lake had then magically risen up, revealing the sacred shell beads that the Indians would call ‘wampum’. The prophet Deganawidah had taken the shells, strung them together and performed a ritual to clear Ayonhwathah’s mind of grief.3

These stories and rituals recapitulated the process by which five Iroquoian-speaking nations – the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas and the Senecas – came together in the Great League of Peace. (In late 1722 or early 1723, the Five Nations became the Six Nations when the Tuscaroras of North Carolina, who had fled northward into New York under intolerable pressure from European settlement were formally adopted into the league.) The confederacy was founded some time between 1450 and 1500, when, according to the myth, Deganawidah (‘the Peacemaker’, in colloquial usage), disturbed by the internecine wars between the nations, set out to preach peace. He converted Ayonhwathah from cannibalism, and then together with him confronted the wicked Onondaga wizard Thadodaho and transformed him into a humane chief whose people would be the ‘fire-keepers’ of the new order. Having created rituals of condolence and gift-giving through which the dead could be appeased symbolically rather than through blood-feuds, Deganawidah instructed the Five Nations to form a grand council under the Tree of Great Peace at Onondaga, which thus became the symbolic centre of Iroquois life.

The confederacy itself was likened in the orally transmitted Great Law of Peace to a longhouse, the typical common dwelling house of the Iroquois peoples. The Mohawks guarded the eastern door, the Senecas the western, and the Onondagas the fireplace in the middle, with the Oneidas and Cayugas securely housed under the roof. The confederacy was also imagined as a tree, the Great White Pine, whose branches sheltered the Five Nations and whose roots spread out to all peoples, regardless of their origins.

The Tuscarora boys, struggling to remember the right formula, now re-enacted for Christopher Johnson’s son the same rites of condolence that Deganawidah had taught to Ayonhwathah. They wiped a string of sacred wampum beads over his face to brush the tears from his eyes so that he might look cheerfully and with friendship on his brother Indians again. They placed another string of wampum on his throat to clear the obstructions which might otherwise prevent him from speaking freely and in the tones of a brother. A third string stripped Christopher Johnson’s death bed and wiped the blood from the dead man’s eyes so that his spirit would rest and cause them no harm. With a white belt, they covered his grave so that he would bring his son no more grief. With another they collected all the bones of William’s dead relatives and buried them deep in the earth so that they would be out of his sight for ever. ‘As you now sit in darkness,’ they said, ‘we remove all the heavy clouds which surround you that you may again behold the light and sunshine.’ Then they poured the clearest water into his body to cleanse his breast and remove the disturbance from his mind.4

These anxious youngsters from the west were followed in late July by twenty of their chiefs, or sachems, who repeated the ritual. They were the last in a line of Indians that had come to Johnson’s house through that summer of 1763 to perform the rites of condolence for his father. On 12 May two chief warriors of the Onondaga nation from near what is now Syracuse, two of the Cayugas, from the area roughly north and south of what is now Auburn, and two of the Mohawks, who lived near him in the area drained by the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers, came to Johnson’s house. Representing the entire Six Nations of the Iroquois confederacy, they had wiped his tears, cleared his throat and heart, covered his father’s grave and buried the bones of his ancestors. A week later, a larger body of Iroquois, including several representatives of the largest and most westerly nation, the Senecas, from the region east of Lake Erie and south of Lake Ontario, had repeated the ceremony.

The repercussions of Christopher Johnson’s death continued to resonate in the forests, swamps and hills of north-eastern America into the spring of the following year. In early March 1764, a party of Iroquois and allied warriors surprised a group of forty-one Delaware Indians on the Northern branch of the Susquehanna River, far to the south-west of Johnson’s home.5 Among the captives they took was a young Delaware woman. They brought her north to the Mohawk valley and gave her to William Johnson as a replacement for his dead father.

They did this to lay Christopher Johnson to rest once and for all by filling the hole in the fabric of tribal and family life that had been left by his demise. It was an old custom. As the Jesuit missionaries who were among the first Europeans to penetrate Iroquois society had written in 1647: ‘These Barbarians are accustomed to give prisoners, whom they do not choose to put to death, to the families who have lost their relatives in war. These prisoners take the place of the deceased, and are incorporated into that family, which alone has the right to kill them or let them live.’6 But, however venerable the custom, it would have been hard to explain to...