A Few Acres of Snow

"These two nations have gone to war over a few acres of snow in Canada, and in it they have spent  great deal more than Canada is worth."

-Voltaire

How I Bought the Book and Why

Overcome with 18^th century fever, born of a fondness for tri-corn hats and large primitive firearms which has been simmering in me for decades, I decided it was about time I read a book specifically dealing with the French and Indian War.  Actually one boring weekend among my many boring weekends I decided I just had to read a book on the French and Indian War IMMEDIATELY!  I had no time to wait for Amazon.com.  “I must have something to read RIGHT NOW,” I thought, so off I went to the local booksellers. 

 I knew the task would not be an easy one.  The French and Indian War (herein FIW) is surprisingly unpopular.  Despite it being an important prelude to the birth of our nation, and full of all kinds of horrible violence, it just can’t compete with Hitler.  Nothing can on the history shelves at the bookstore.  You can find 5 books on Waffen SS shoelaces before you find one on the Seven Years War, or the FIW.  If all you had to go on was a quick glance of the history section at your local bookstore, you’d probably think that the only two significant events in ALL OF RECORDED HUMAN HISTORY were World War II and the American Civil War.  To sum up the history section at the bookstore: 

Nazis:  30%

Modern Military History:  20%

American Civil War: 20%

American Rev:  10%

Napoleon: 3%

General European History and General World History: 15%

Other, encompassing the rest of global human history: 2%

So I went to all three of the big bookstores in my general area, South Tampa Borders, North Dale Mabry Borders, and North Dale Mabry Barnes and Noble.  I eventually found the only copy of the only book in TAMPA commercially available about the French and Indian War: 

 A Few Acres of Snow:  The Saga of the French and Indian Wars by Robert Leckie. 

I didn’t thumb through it much in the store.  I scanned the front and back…”outstanding historical survey…pre-revolutionary America,” it looked good enough to start.  This was just to tide me over until I could get some stuff from the Internet. 

 What was in the Book

It turned out to cover a much wider swath of history than I was originally looking for, but that was not a bad thing in the slightest.  Leckie’s book covers Anglo-French conflict in North America from Champlain’s founding of New France (1610ish) to the fall of Quebec to the English (1760).  There’s a whole pile-o-wars in that time period.  Armed with that overview, the next book I read on the FIW will be much more easily placed in a context. 

In a nutshell, Samuel Champlain founds New France up in Canada, the British colonize the 13 colonies with which we are all familiar.  New France was always more of a military operation than the British Colonies.  Speaking very generally, New France was a few forts and trading posts.  People went there to make money.  The British colonies were places people went to live.  There were skirmishes and raids nearly from the beginning, but on the eve of the Seven Years War, there were 40,000 people in all of New France, and 1.25 million in the British colonies.   Regular troops from the mother country were more reliable.  Colonial Militia had farms they wanted to get back to, and were generally poorly trained and undisciplined. Regular soldiers did most of the fighting on both sides throughout the period, and that mitigated the huge discrepancy in population numbers, as did better Franco-Indian relations.  In the later part of the period, a serious corruption problem among civil administrators in New France, superior British numbers, Pit the Elders leadership choice for the campaign against Quebec, a little luck, and probably most importantly, British command of the Atlantic lead to British dominance in North America.

I liked the fact that Leckie didn’t pull any punches with the Indians.  This is a touchy subject.  Yes, we white people did kill almost all the Indians eventually, and that was not nice, but they weren’t the nicest people either.  They killed women and children, and worse.  They slowly pealed the skin off of their prisoners for days and days.  They drove splinters into their captive’s genitals, and after days, weeks, or maybe months of torture, they ate their captives.  They made mothers EAT their own children’s dismembered body parts…They weren’t a bunch of peaceful naked hippies hanging out in the woods.  They did all this stuff to each other for centuries before the Europeans showed up.  They were all for massacring and eliminating entire cultures of people, they just didn’t have the technology, or the tactics. 

 A good point that Leckie makes is that the Indians method of warfare was based on what they had learned from hunting, which is good for ambushing people in the woods, but when faced with the combination of fortification and firearms, they were completely ineffective.    

Leckie’s style is more narrative than academic.  This isn’t bad as some of the more scholarly history texts can get quite dry.  However he told a couple stories in the middle of the book that I wasn’t that interested in and didn’t seem immediately necessary to the topic at hand.  I nodded off a little reading about Queen Anne. 

One thing that was lacking that I desperately wanted:  MAPS.  I’m not only from America, but from Florida.  I’m not that familiar with Canadian geography and the names for some of these places have changed.  Maps are important to studying this stuff.  You need to know what marching from Boston to Quebec means.  I’d also like to see some maps showing population distribution at various times during the periods covered.    

So it is not a book on the French and Indian War, it is a worthwhile book if you’re interested in North American Colonial history.