The Firekeeper: A Narrative of the Eastern Frontier

I love this book, and I especially love it because most of it is fact. The author tells you in the back of the book what he inserted to make the story flow, what he could not find from his research. The story holds your interest, especially if you are interested in the time when the Europeans first occupied this land.

The Firekeeper is an evocative romp of a tale, spanning the eighteenth century from Ireland to New England. It gives both Native American and White perspectives, showing how the two cultures intertwined and clashed in rich and heartbreaking human drama. Moss creates a colorful, vivid portrait of Sir William Johnson (a multitudinous man in every sense of the word), and describes the hardships endured by women on the frontier with sensitivity and realism. I was completely drawn into the narrative, feeling myself there in direct experience. I loved the novel and was sorry when it ended. I came to The Firekeeper after reading Moss' later books on dreaming, all of which I highly recommend. I was so impressed with Dreamways of the Iroquois and its story of Island Woman, that it led me to seek out Firekeeper. Now at the top of my book stack are The Interpreter and Fire Along the Sky. In my experience as a reader, Robert Moss is an unusually talented author. His skills as a historian, researcher, storyteller, writer, teacher, dreamer, and healer combine to create books that are both a delight to read and a necessity for our times.

A wonderful book by a singularly marvellous author! The best two books (along with FIRE ALONG THE SKY) I've read in years. As rich as any historical novel ever written. Travel to a vanished world in upstate New York for a few hours. And discover that Colonial America was a vibrant and violent time. America's first frontier--Too bad it's overshadowed by our preoccupation with the 19th-century Western mythology. The 18th century was far more fascinating!

In the dry, often dull, pages of thousands of eighteenth century documents, the researcher and student of history meets--in his or her studies of upstate New York--the names of characters who shaped the cultural and geographic boundaries of the lands bordering and expanding beyond the Mohawk River into the thick forests of the eighteenth century western frontier. Principal among those names is that of Sir William Johnson and his intricately woven web of clients, agents, military personnel, merchants, commissaries, politicians, tenants, and tradesmen, all backdropped against the powerful confederacy of the Six Nations. In THE FIREKEEPER, Robert Moss plunges beneath the carefully penned words of conferences, negotiations, land deals, and the giving and receiving of thousands of belts and strings of wampum and chests of gifts to find the phrase, the inuendo, the pause, the missing sentence that allows one to grasp the beauty and power of the raw courage, stamina, and charisma of the men and women who were the real heroes of the New York frontier. William Johnson held the legal responsibility for the negotiation of Indian affairs for the Six Nations and proved the extraordinary confidence and credit in which he was held by the Six Nations in his care and use of the magnificent symbols of Indian power and authority--the belts, the sacred calumets, and the dreams. In the dreaming culture of the Six Nations, William Johnson was caught up in a delicate balance between the magical world of spirit and soul in which he donned the antlers of the forest stag and the competitive white world where wills and cultures clashed in battle and on paper. Woven in and among the threads of the fascinating story of THE FIREKEEPER is the even more powerful story of the women in William Johnson's world--the young Palatine girl who pursued her dreams across the sea from bondage to the purchased freedom of a frontier pulsing with the clash of desire and spirit, of the fusing of the sacred and profane in a forest peopled with refugees from her own country and with the magical dreaming women of power of the Six Nations, of the Mohawks, women with names like Island Woman and Sparrow, all of whom would share in the romance and spirit of William Johnson's world, molded from the dreams of many cultures, a magical journey of spirit and soul brought to life by Robert Moss through the pages of THE FIREKEEPER.