Gideon's People

by Dally-starna, Corinna; Starna, William A.

• ISBN13: 9780803224278
• ISBN10: 0803224273
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

Gideon's Peopleis the story of an American Indian community in the Housatonic Valley of northwestern Connecticut. It is based on some three decades of nearly uninterrupted German-language diaries and allied records kept by the Moravian missionaries who had joined the Indians at a place called Pachgatgoch, later Schaghticoke. It is supplemented by colonial records and regional political, social, and religious histories and ethnographies. As such, it represents the only comprehensive, thoroughly contextualized description of a Native people in southern New England and adjacent eastern New York for the mid-eighteenth century. The Moravians' diaries report on the day-to-day activities in the community, including house-building, the production of material goods, hunting, fishing, and farming. We are told of marriages, births, deaths, disease, and the calamity of alcohol abuse. The unavoidable interactions with surrounding Indians and close-by colonial farmers and townspeople are offered in detail, along with the sometimes contentious relations with local and colonial authorities. And there is the omnipresence of the missionaries' religious message to the Indians, frequently accepted and then tested by the inevitable temptations, and, more than once, spurned. But we also learn of the struggles of the Moravians to feed and clothe themselves at a distance from their congregation in Bethlehem and their endeavours, often marked by conflict and deep personal pain, to lead their Native flock to the Lamb.

Author Biography

Corinna Dally-Starna is the translator of Lakotas, Black Robes, and Holy Women: German Reports from the Indian Missions in South Dakota, 1886-1900 (Nebraska 2007). William A. Starna is a professor emeritus of anthropology at State University of New York College at Oneonta. He is the coeditor of Iroquois Journey: An Anthropologist Remembers (Nebraska 2007) and of Adriaen van der Donck’s A Description of New Netherland (Nebraska 2008).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Maps

Introductions

Translation and Editorial Comments The Pachgatgoch Diaries: Johann David Bishoff : 18 May to 5 June 1747

Abraham Buninger: 27 June to 11 December 1751

Joachim Heinrich Sensemann: 6 December 1751 to 15 April 1752

Carl Gottfried Rundt: 15 April to 22 May 1752

Joachim Heinrich Sensemann: 7 August 1752 to 18 February 1753

Joachim Heinrich Sensemann: 19 February 1753 to 27 February 1754

Joachim Heinrich Sensemann: 2 March to 14 May 1754

No. A. Appendix to the Bethlehem: 2 March to 14 May 1754

Christian Heinrich Rauch: 17 June to 27 July 1754

Abraham Buninger and Christian Heinrich Rauch: 25 July to 31 December 1754

Abraham Buninger and Carl Gottfried Rundt: 1 January to 7 December 1755

Christian Seidel: 17 November to 22 December 1755

Richard Utley: 19 December 1755 to 18 January 1756

Nicolas Heinrich Eberhardt: 28 February 1756 to 13 March 1757

14 March to 7 November 1757

Bernhard Adam Grube: 12 October to 29 December 1758

1 January to 11 August 1760

Johann Martin Mack: 15 August 1760 to 11 January 1761

12 January 1761 to 14 February 1762

Joachim Heinrich Sensemann: 16 February to 31 July 1763

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Appendix 4

List of Moravian and Colonial Participants

Gazetter

Glossary

Latin Terms and Abbreviations

Symbols

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

References Cited

Index?

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