Beschreibung:

NATIVE AMERICANS] ADAIR, JAMES. The History of the American Indians; Particularly those Nations Adjoining to the Missisippi, E... ... London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1775. First edition, the copy of Colonel Guy Johnson the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern department. Brown calf of the period, all edges red. 10 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches (27 x 21 cm); folding map, [10], 464 pp. Front board detached, rear joint cracked but holding on cords, spine dry, a fairly neatly repaired transverse repair to the first section of the map, some worming (mostly very minor) in the lower margin from signature 2I on. With Johnson's name at the upper right of the title "Col. Guy Johnson/London March 1776," and with a laid-in letter from Coutts, the bankers, dated July 1789 (the year after his death), regarding the state of the American debentures belonging to Johnson's estate, a letter apparently delivered to John Campbell his Canadian counterpart, who may have been acting as executor. An exceptional Revolutionary War association copy of Adair's great work on the Indian. Guy Johnson (circa 1740-1788), was born in Ireland and by June of 1756 was living with his uncle, Sir William Johnson in the Mohawk Valley. Sir William was British superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern department, and Guy Johnson served with him during the 1759 Niagara campaign, in addition to acting as his secretary, and became a public official and a landowner in his own right. However, in 1774 Sir William died in the midst of negotiating a treaty with the Six Nations Iroquois, and Guy Johnson assumed his post. An ardent Loyalist, he raised a militia against the Continental Congress, but in July of 1775 he was forced to evacuate to Fort Oswego, where his wife died in childbirth. At Oswego and in Montreal, Johnson organized Native Americans to fight for the Crown but encountered bureaucratic resistance from Guy Carleton, the Governor-in-Chief in Quebec. In November of 1775 he voyaged to London, in the company of Joseph Brant, the Mohawk Indian leader, to persuade the Crown to address past Mohawk land grievances in exchange for their participation as allies in the impending war. He also succeeded in having his position ratified, though his activities in Canada were proscribed. He was back in New York by July of 1776, so he must have purchased this copy of Adair, a book in which he must have had keen interest, shortly before his return. He returned to Canada in 1779, and was in part responsible for the notorious "burning of the Valleys," the massacres in the Wyoming and Cherry Valleys on which the poem by Thomas Campbell Gertude of Wyoming is based. In 1781, he was officially reprimanded for abuse of funds (used to provide recompense for Loyalist refugees) by the Governor-in Chief Frederick Haldimand. Shortly thereafter, he returned to London in disgrace in order to defend his conduct, and later to seek recompense for the loss of his New York house and lands. Based on the letter from Coutts, he must have been partially successful, but the funds (debentures to the value of 5350 pounds) seem not to have been received until the year after his death. C