Mohawk Valley Tales
Mohawk Valley Life - 1764 to 1783
The main characters in the two books, Dorothea Werner and Patrick Fitzpatrick, are based on the real lives of indentured servants who worked for members of the powerful, wealthy family of Sir William Johnson, Superintendant of Indian Affairs in the years before the Revolutionary War.
The books are biographical historic fiction, as true to the actual historic figures and events as possible, while imagining the rest of the story for the barely documented men and women of the time. Largely illiterate, these simple folk left no diaries and letters to tell of their experiences.
In 1764, when the story begins, the Mohawk Valley was the home of an extraordinary mixture of people, languages and cultures, and the Mohawk River was the highway from the vast, Indian-dominated western and northern interior to the British-dominated eastern portions of the Province of New York.