Excerpt from Ponteach, or the Savages of America: A Tragedy And in a measure Rogers was right; for the tragedy is one that can scarcely be forgotten; and waiving its merely curious attraction as the strange product of an American backwoodsman suddenly transported to the center of anglo-saxon civilization and fashion, its chief claim to a reprieve from oblivion lies in those historical elements upon which Rogers mistakenly hoped to base a temporary appeal. Parkman and other writers upon the period have attested its value by a liberal use of it as a source. In his military service at Albany and the forts immediately north, in his rangings over upper New York' and lower Canada, and in his survey of the lake posts at the close of the Seven Years War, Rogers had by 1762 familiarized himself with the conditions of Indian life and the strange facts evoked by the attempted adjustment to it of English authority, com merce, and agriculture; he had, indeed, engaged in the trade himself, and so had felt both a soldier's and a merchant's concern in inter-racial relations. Participa tion in the suppression of Pontiac's rebellion in 1763 finally equipped him with the adequate knowledge of the chief and his conspiracy which the tragedy mani fests. Indeed, Rogers' informing historical accuracy is - beyond the many definite parallels between the language of the play and that of the Concise Account one of the surest establishments of the authorship which he never formally claimed. No other hand in London could have written with such directness and truth to fact the two first and expository acts of the drama. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.