Raymond Seitz
The Original Action Man
White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America
By Fintan O’Toole
Faber & Faber 320pp £20 order from our bookshop
Baron Jean-Armand de Dieskau, commander of the combined French, Canadian and Indian forces, was hit three times in the legs and once in the hip, and he crawled through the New York thicket to the shelter of a tree. In the confusion of the forest battle that raged on the southern shoreline of Lake George, he was abandoned to his fate. That fate could have been pretty grisly. Had Dieskau been found by one of the Mohawks who fought with the British forces on that September day in 1755, he surely would have been dispatched and scalped.
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