Volume 52, Number 19 · December 1, 2005
The Irish Indian Chief
By John Brewer
White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America
by Fintan O'Toole
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 402 pp., $26.00
When Sir William Johnson died in July 1774, he was one of the richest and most powerful men in colonial America. He bequeathed large sums of money to his numerous children (including eight by his Native American spouse, Degonwadonti, known as Molly Brant) and an astonishing 170,000 acres of land on the banks of the Ohio River and in the state of New York. Johnson, who in 1755 had been knighted as first baronet of New York for his successes in the French and Indian Wars, had carved out a career and accumulated a fortune as a colonial trader, functionary, soldier, and adventurer in upstate New York. His achievements, as Fintan O'Toole repeatedly shows in his elegantly written biography, White Savage, were largely the result of his exceptional skills as a mediator between the growing number of European colonists and the indigenous peoples who, though a declining population, nevertheless remained a powerful force, not least because of their strategic importance in the struggle between the English and the French for the control of North America.
Review, 4302 words
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