text: Perhaps the long shadow of Francis Parkman has discouraged historians from writing about the French and Indian War (Seven Year's War).  Whatever the reason it's good to see from the publication of several books that Americans are taking a renewed interest in the pre-revolutionary period when the British were triumphant and the Indians still counted as a political force.  
  
  It's past time for a thorough revision of Parkman -- who was ungenerous with the Indians although I thrilled as a young reader to his descriptions of their ferocity -- for example, the "insensate fury" of the Iroquois.  Actually, the Iroquois were less insensate than they were astute.  
  
  Calloway omits the bloody details and vivid writing of Parkman but he gives us a thorough picture of what happened in the wake of the English victory over the French in North America.  In particular he focuses on the frontier and the built-in conflict of American settlers, British policy, and the Indian tribes who either went down to defeat with the French or were betrayed by perfidious Albion.  They made their point, however, in Pontiac's War and by clearing white settlers from the frontier. But their  numbers were declining and they would soon be overwhelmed. 
          
  This is a good book about the issues of the frontier between Whites and Indians.  In addition, there's a good account of the French movement from Canada to Louisiana and the Spanish rule in Florida and the trans-Mississippi.  
  
  Smallchief 
  