Drums along the Mohawk (1936) - Walter D. Edmonds

Written by Walter D. Edmonds
Read by Mark Bramhall
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: August 4, 2015
Duration: 21:01:46

“They saw a shape at the far edge of the burning, running towards them through the smoke. Then one of the trees along the creek caught fire, making a torch that for a moment seemed to take all blue out of the sky and turn it black. The suction of the flame drew off the smoke, and all of them saw the Indian, stripped to the waist, trotting towards them…”
- Walter D. Edmonds, Drums Along the Mohawk

Drums along the Mohawk, Walter D. Edmonds’ masterpiece, is not only the best historical novel about upstate New York since James Fenimore Cooper, it was also number one on the bestseller list for two years, only yielding to the epic Gone with the Wind.

This is the story of the forgotten pioneers of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolutionary War. Here Gilbert Martin and his young wife struggled and lived and hoped. Combating hardships almost too great to endure, they helped give to America a legend that still stirs the heart.

In the midst of love and hate, life and death, danger and disaster, they stuck to the acres that were theirs and fought a war without ever quite understanding it. Drums along the Mohawk has been an American classic since its original publication in 1936.

A review…. This is great old-school story-telling and great historical fiction. There’s so much going on. You certainly get caught up with the characters, most of them not fictionalized but real historical people, as are most of the events in the book. But it’s the whole world-view that I found so powerful. The frontier of early America not the West, as it would later be and forever remain in our national imagination, but upstate New York. That was a revelation. And what the Revolutionary War was like fought on that frontier, with bloody terrifying skirmishes between settler-farmers and British irregulars and their Indian allies. And how the war often pitted neighbor against neighbor. We think of that with the American Civil War, but the Revolutionary War did that too, with often terrible and tragic personal consequences.

It was basis for the film in 1938 starring a very young Henry Fonda.