Alan Taylor may be the best American historian working today. (We’re limiting the conversation to real historians, not cheerleaders like David McCullough.) Taylor’s latest, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, tells in meticulous detail how the several Iroquois tribes got snookered out of the land that is now western New York and parts of Pennsylvania and Ontario.
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The Indians did their best to claim this right; the settlers denied it to them through a clever combination of violence, chicanery, rum, and forced sales. Whether your standards are religious, humanitarian, libertarian, or all three, the settlers repeatedly wronged the Indians, and the Indians knew it. At no time in the crucial years Taylor covers did white Americans treat Indians as they would have wanted to be treated. Instead, might made right.
