Wilderness Messiah: The Story of Hiawatha and the Iroquois

From the dust jacket comes this excerpt: "This unusual book is an interpretation of the Iroquois Indian's many-sided genius -- their talent for government, their ways in war, their conduct in family living, their religious beliefs. Throughout the book the real Hiawatha -- not Longfellow's fictional brave -- is a symbol of this genius, for it was he who persuaded the Iroquoian tribes to settle their suicidal differences and unite in the Great Peace of the 15th Century. And it was this confederation that decided the fate of a continent. "The confederation was one of the few pure republics the world has ever known, and there is some evidence that it influenced the founding fathers while they were modeling the young American Republic. The Iroquois influence has persisted for centuries and has been highly commended by men of stature -- Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin among them. George Washington was the only white man ever admitted to the paradise of the Five Nations. Probably nowhere else in the world has the status of women been as high as among the Iroquois. What a fruitful civilization the Iroquois might have established had America been "discovered" just a few centuries later. Both conjecture and fact come alive in the pages of this distinctive history.