Colin G. Calloway

In this sweeping new biography, Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington's life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time-Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle-and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America's founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades...

" ... A large number of Native leaders were well acquainted with city life. In fact, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were in town often, regularly traveling to Albany, Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, Montreal, Quebec, New York and New Orleans -- primarly to conduct diplomatic or trade business, but often from a sense of curiosity and adventure. Some were even tourists. ... Based on primary accounts, Calloway's book...

Indian peoples made some four hundred treaties with the United States between the American Revolution and 1871, when Congress prohibited them. They signed nine treaties with the Confederacy, as well as countless others over the centuries with Spain, France, Britain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, Canada, and even Russia, not to mention individual colonies and states. In retrospect, the treaties seem like well-ordered steps on the path of dispossession...