Posted on 11/04/2009 4:41:39 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Walter D. Edmond’s exciting novel of the Mohawk Valley during the American Revolution has come to the Roxy’s screen in a considerably elided, but still basically faithful, film edition bearing the trademark of Director John Ford, one of the best cinema story-tellers in the business.
Reviewer Nugent will pen screenplays for several of Ford’s movies in years to come.
What a great movie!
I am really becoming a big fan of older movies and TCM.
One of the few movies where you can see loading blocks for the muzzle loading rifles being used.
I take it that is a historically accurate detail? Sounds like a John Ford touch.
If you're into genealogy read the book ~ it's about people whose names appear in those old church records ~ you'll find, though, that the writer of the book changed all the names so that no one would be embarrassed. Still, I've figured a lot of them out.
First of all, not all the Indians there are Mohawk. Bunch of them are Oneida and Canandagua who were allied with the United States. Virtually all of them were Christian and had grown up in a mixed-race community where white and Indian farmers worked side by side on mostly Onedia land.
I can place the names on the family with the 16 to 20 children ~ and probably 50% of their descendants! The source data clearly shows the baby count in that family was a dynamic, ever-changing situation.
The reviewer at the time thought the Cherry Valley/Canajoharie region was mostly German, and who wouldn't think that about the folks from Herkimer, but in reality the Germans were a distinct minority. Move-ins from Pennsylvania from the New Sweden colonies (see York PA, Elkton MD, Elkins WV, etc.) were very represented in the Lutheran records ~ it's always wrong to assume a Lutheran has to come from Germany. Back in the mid 1600s most of the Lutherans in the Colonies were coming from Scandinavia. In 1700 when Penn began bringing in English Quakers to Eastern PA, the Scandinavians fled to the West and North. They were cutting trees in the area long before the Palitinate Germans reached Palatine Bridge.
And then there were the fur traders ~ composed variously of Mohicans, Huguenots, mixed race people, and so on.
Sure enough when the Revolution hit this area the people had to defend their communities, but the higher order politics had been settled long before when the English drove them from Eastern Pennsylvania, or, worst of all, when the English ships brought Germans to America and then the English transported them to a raw wilderness along the Mohawk.
The English also forced the Iriquois Confederation to cover the fires of their council rings. Their country died and they fell to conducting war against their own relatives ~ with Mohawks and Seneca slaughtering fellow clan members in Oneda and Canandagua.
Not good at all.
In 1939 the reviewer shows the bias of his time ~ the Indians were simply a fixture! Today we know better.
It is available to watch instantly on Netflix.
I don't have any profound insights on the movie. It has a standard story line. I am not a big Henry Fonda fan. I do like Claudette Colbert, so I guess that is a wash. One thing that occurred to me is that the period may be changing on us. You know how after watching a movie for a short time you can tell what decade it is from. I don't mean just the hair styles or clothing, but more subtle production value type things. I With "Drums Along the Mohawk" I was thinking "forties." Maybe that is the Claudette Colbert factor.
It shouldn’t cost you anything. We have the lowest subscription 8.95 I think a month and we get two DVDs a week (depending on how fast we turn them in) and we watch as many instant views as we want. One rainy weekend we decided to watch an entire season of LOST because we had never seen it. Doesn’t cost extra at all for online movies or tv shows.
Leni/MinuteGal
If folks from New Sweden came there likely they included some Finns.
They nearly depopulated the Northeastern part of the Sapmai/Sapma ~ leaving the Skolt nation nearly destroyed.
In the early times (1600s) the term FINN on a ship's manifest usually meant someone from the Finland ~ which simply meant the far-North. Almost all non-Swedish speaking people on any Swedish ship's manifest were identified as FIN or FINN, meaning "someone from the Sapmai".
Finland, as a unique and identifiable territory with it's own characteristics, didn't come into existence until the mid 1700s. By 1810 Finland received independence from the Swedish Empire and was assigned to the Czar of Russia as a grand duchy.
It is from that time, the early 1800s, that we find FOR REAL Fins immigrating to America in large numbers. In the 1812 famine you had vast numbers of Fins, vast numbers of Russians and vast numbers of Sa'ami getting out of the way as best they could. The Chinese may have lost up to 300 million people in that one ~ which is probably why you rarely hear of it ~ it was just terrible. Russian fur traders had to travel all the way to Alaska to find furs the devastation of animal life had been so thorough.
Anyway, we get off the point ~ yeah, there were Fins here ~ but not like the ones folks think of today ~ in reality, there were Sa'mi in America from the earliest times, frequently mistaken for Fins by later generations.
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