Batteaux and 'Battoe Men':...American Colonial...Logistics in Mountain Warfare

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Wow ... much-appreciated bit of history. I still maintain a certain (though imperfect) Catholic distinction ... else how could Latin American Catholics still need missionaries? =)

So ...

The Iroquois made them stipulate to being a bunch a girls? Ouch.

Have you got anything to help me understand why at Gorbachev's World State conference in NY (9/2000, I think) there was so much emphasis on the Great Law of the Iroquois's having such a profound effect on the founding fathers and being a model for our founding documents?

Has that a firm basis in fact?

One of Sullivan's officers foresaw the consequences of this war-within-a-war a few days before he was killed. "Our mission here is ostensibly to destroy but may it not transpire that we pillagers are carelessly sowing the seeds of Empire?" (p. 186). Indeed they were, but this new empire would take a very different shape from the one that preceded it

Well, to be honest ... particularly now that they're strong enough to suck us as they please into the bloody heart of the revolution that is Terror ... it only crystallizes many aspects of my musings to date.

Can't thank you enough for the reply.

Best regards.

"Fiske goes to some length to explain how it is that notions of liberty come from the Teutonic tribes, and how it is that these ideas develop most extensively in England while the majority of the Teutonic Tribes succumbed to a greater extent to Roman influences. Not surprising given that the Romans dumped the most difficult of the Teutonic tribes into ancient Britain to get them out of the way of their progress on the European mainland...."

This is close to utter nonsense. Nor did the Romans ever dump or push "difficult Teutons" into their nicely "villa"-ed and well-roaded Britain.

Indeed, the Roman conquest of Britain in the first place was the final response to sustained Celtic and Druid interference in Gaul. Caesar's earlier expedition and interests were similar.

As for who was serving in the legions based in Britain, you may find some interesting inscriptions in Chester and elsewhere.

For all that you yourself, and beyond Fiske, make some interesting if undeveloped points about the Mohawks and the Iroquois League, which had close relations with the Dutch, and about some of the other tribes.

There are also interesting parallels between how the Romans in some periods dealt with Celtic or German tribes and the different and several colonies' relations with such tribes in their spheres of interest and beyond.

So too with the relations of both the later Romani and the Eastern Romaioi with Gemans, Huns, Vikings, Slavs, and so forth.

New England was an unusual case—there was in fact a comparative dearth of natives when the "Pilgrims" landed, which some attribute to a smallpox epidemic, which in turn some also attribute to a landing by one of Gorges' ships a few years before.

There is no doubt the different Europeans all had technological superiority, but small firearms and crossbows were the least important of these, if superior at all. Ships and sail, navigation and maps, architecture and construction, mining and metallurgy, writing, cannon, horses and cavalry, road-building—all these and others much more decisive over the long run.

Also significant—before the Spanish and Portuguese and their employees invented them, there were no such entities as North and South "America" or "American Indian", even among the Iroquois in the North or the Aztecs and Inca in the South.

Pity Longfellow is no longer widely read, understood, or appreciated, and not just in regard to "Hiawatha."

Best regards. S&W R.I.P.

Don't exert yourself. Gibbon says nothing of the sort in regard to the passage I excerpted.

If you are talking about the inroads of the Angles and Saxons into Britain, that is much later, and their success hinged on Roman withdrawal for reasons completely unconnected with their raiding.

First of all the Teutones were but one tribe.

Second, as with "American Indians", there is a real question whether there were any "Germans" before the Romans identified them as a "group", and Tacitus later idealized them in his Germania, which is as much about what he found unsatisfactory in the Romans of his day as it is about the "noble savages" he so eruditely anthropologized.

You might also investigate why the East Romans at one point made wearing trousers unlawful.

For the "Romanization" of Germans, a good start is Augsburg.

Best regards. S&W R.I.P.

"Teutones, shmootones or blue seudes, we are talking her of the diverse peoples who were the progenitors of modern german speaking folk. The were many tribes, but today they are all marked by a propensity to speak English better than we do when they take it up as a second language...."

The proper term is speakers of "Germanic" languages, not "German-Speakers."

They are definitely a language group. They have no propensity for speaking English as a second language better than "we do" (native speakers), though admittedly many of them have a marked propensity to think they do.

Hilariously, much of the "bad English" the European variety criticizes in Americans is legitmate American English, including calques, derived from Germanic speakers in New York, Pennsylvania, and later Chicago, who brought habits of their native Germanic languages into American English.

By the way, many "Germans" have this propensity about the superiority of their speaking even second languages not only in English, but in other languages as well, even at times, French, hehe.

"Golden Age"—hehe. Tell me how did the Marcomanni fare in what Gibbon calls the "Golden Age"?

Now those Pannonians—some tough mothers.

Best regards. S&W R.I.P.

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