Episode Details

In 1755 the most powerful native confederacy on the continent was pulled into a war that was not its own — and discovered that the balance it had worked for a hundred years was beginning to fail. This is the Battle of Lake George, told from inside the bind it closed on the Six Nations. The old Mohawk sachem Hendrick, famous enough to have crossed the ocean and stood in the court of the King of England, rode out for the British against a French army that had Mohawks of its own, after warning that the column sent to meet it was “too many to die, too few to fight.” On a road above a lake the British had just renamed for their king, the People of the Longhouse met themselves in battle for the first and only time in the war — while behind a wall of logs, a few thousand colonial farmers beat a European army in the open and took its general alive, prompting that captured baron’s grudging verdict that they had fought “in the morning like good boys, at noon like men, in the afternoon like devils.” It was the only good news of a disastrous year — and the beginning of the end of the Iroquois balance.