History as Fiction, Fiction as History

HISTORYAS FICTION, FICTIONAS HISTORY ErnestH. Redekop Geoffrey Rans. TheLeather-StockingTales:A SecularReading. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. xviii + 292pp. Ian K Steele. Betrayals:FortWilliamHenryand the ''Massacre." NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1990. ii + 250 pp. Illus. Ian Steele's title for this detailed and elegant history of the fall of Fort William Henry might very well have been a sub-title for Geoffrey Rans's equally detailed and elegant analysis of the Leather-Stocking Tales. The immediate nexus between these two books is the "massacre" of 1757, the focus of Steele's work and the major historical incident underlyingTheLast of the Mohicans, the most famous of Cooper's five Leather-Stocking Tales, and this would perhaps in itself justify a review of these two books together. Steele's title anticipates an analysis of the notorious failure of Montcalm to protect his English and American prisoners from bis Indian allies after the surrender of Fort William Henry and the refusal of General Webb to come to the aid of the besieged garrison during the fighting;but it also, in this wellbalanced history, calls to mind the Indians' view that Montcalm reneged on his agreement to reward them after the surrender of the Englishgarrison. Betrayals are also a continuing motif for Rans, who is deeply concerned with the ways in which Cooper depicts the betrayal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of hopes for a fair accommodationwith the continent's aboriginal peoples and the betrayal of prospects for a healthy relation between settlers and the natural ecosystem which some of them systematically plundered and then destroyed--although this latter betrayal is rather more complex than a reading only of ThePioneerswouldsuggest. In a sense, too, Rans is attacking what he regards as a kind of betrayal by some Cooper critics who have taken formalistic or aesthetic approaches to the reading of the Leather-Stocking Tales. His own critique of Cooper should lead readers to a salutary recovery of a writer who washonest in imagination, decisivein political morality and didactic in fiction. Reading the two books in tandem teaches one again how contingent the reading of both history and fiction must be and how closelyrelated, in 420 Ernest H. Redekop some ways, each is to the other. What we know of the history of the battle for Fort William Henry is only our interpretation of what was written down-written by American, French or English observers and historians, never by any member of the various Indian tribes who took part in the French and Indian War. The realization of this obvious truth, that each account of the "massacre" is a somewhat arbitrary ordering of events, causes, effects and conclusionsin verbal structures that derive from the biases, nationalities and ideologies of the writers--verbal structure which are therefore, in a sense, fictions--makes the reading of the history of the "massacre" an unendingly problematical exercise,not unlike the reading of fiction. Steele is an historian who takes great pains to discover, assemble and present historical data; he is also a very fine stylist. He writes in a straightforward way that captivates the reader by its deceptive simplicity. This is the history of the battle of Fort William Henry, we say--but then we discover, as we read through his book, how problematic our perceptions of that history can become. He begins with "Approaches 11 --not only military approaches to the remote lake by defenders who needed to build a fort and then by attackers who wished to demolish it, but investigative approaches to the various and conflicting reports confronting the historian. He ends with "Perceptions," a summation of various historical views of the battle, emphasizing the refrangible nature of the light any historian may, for a moment, shine on events that retreat continually into forgetfulness and that must be as continually recovered by new insights, new patterns. In between, the climax to the book, is the "Massacre11 --alwaysin quotation marks, always a tentative and shifting designation for an action seen differently by the English, the colonial Americans, the French, the French-Canadians, the Abenaki, the Mohawk, the Caughnawaga, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, the Seneca, the Tuscarora, the Delaware, the Nipissing, the...