"A Few Acres of Snow": The Saga of the French and Indian Wars

Historian Robert Leckie is renowned for his combative prose and pugnacious opinions concerning the major triumphs and tragedies of the U.S. armed forces, and fans will not be disappointed in A Few Acres of Snow, in which he tackles Britain's conquest of North America. Beginning with Europe's first contact with the Americas, Leckie lays a solid geopolitical foundation for his discussion of the various conflicts that tore across Canada and the northern American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Leckie betrays his Francophilia with extensive court gossip and decadent anecdotes of the European elite; the most detailed accounts of colonialism concern New France and the efforts of its military governors, traders, and priests to wrest order from a landscape imperiled by Iroquois attackers, British invaders, and, perhaps most fatally, corruption from within the governing body itself. (In his concluding chapter on Montcalm's defeat on the Fields of Abraham, Leckie speculates that Quebec's governor, Vaudreuil, might have deliberately sabotaged his nation's defenses out of monetary self-interest.)

A Few Acres of Snow also rejects recent scholarship on the French-Indian Wars by Richard White and Robert Merrill, which has revised traditional Native American roles from that of bloodthirsty savages to active participants in the Northwest Territory's political economy. Leckie's account often reads like a cantankerous, politically incorrect throwback to an era of historical writing where the Iroquois spent most of their time torturing Jesuits and roasting babies while the European civilizations, corrupt and flawed as they were, ultimately claimed an unruly empire. --John M. Anderson