Bloody Footprints 71efficient, slave-worked plantations rushed for western land. These
settler-farmers thus set, as Grenier writes, "a prefigurative pattern
of U.S. annexation and colonization of Indigenous nations across
the continent for the following century: a vanguard of farmer
settlers led by seasoned 'Indian fighters,' calling on authorities/
militias of the British colonies, first, and the U.S. government/army
later, to defend their settlements, forming the core dynamic of U.S.
'democracy."'39
The French and Indian War would later be seen as the trigger
for independence of the settler population, in which the distinctly
"American" nation was born. This mythology was expressed in the
1826 novel The Last of the Mahicans: A Narrative of 1757 , in which
the author-land speculator James Fenimore Cooper-created a us
able settler-colonial history. Blockbuster Hollywood adaptations of
the book in 1932 and 1992 reinforced the mythology. But the 1940
film, based on the best-selling novel Northwest Passage, which is
considered a classic and remains popular due to repeated television
showings, goes even further in portraying the bloodthirsty merce
naries, Rogers's Rangers, as heroes for their annihilation of a village
of Abenakis. 40
THE OHIO COUNTRY
The settlers' war for independence from Britain paralleled a decade
of "Indian wars" (1774-83), all with settler-rangers using extreme
violence against Indigenous noncombatants with the goals of total
subjugation or expulsion. The British governor of Virginia, John
Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, sided with British settlers who
wanted land in the Ohio Country (in part because he was himself a
land speculator). In his view, no royal policy could prevent settlers'
seizure of Indigenous land. In early 1774 , the Shawnee Nation in the
Ohio Va lley region responded to settler encroachment on its farm
lands and hunting grounds by raiding illicit settlements and chasing
out land surveyors. The settlers seem to have been waiting for just
such an excuse to retaliate viciously. Dunmore commissioned 150
Virginia settler-rangers to destroy Shawnee towns, and he mobilized