Books, Arts & Manners: The Last of Johnstown

JOHNSTOWN, New York, is an hour west of Albany on the New York State Thruway. The hills of the Mohawk River Valley, in which it lies, are wrinkled rather than rolling. Occasionally a traveler gets a side view down the rows of a cornfield. But the soil is mostly too rocky to support anything but dairy cows.

This plain setting had its share of great events, thanks to the Indians who once lived there. Father Isaac Jogues, one of the seventeenth-century French Jesuits who tried to convert them, was martyred just across the river. The historian Francis Parkman cuts short a description of his torments with the remark that further details “would be as monotonous as revolting.”

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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JOHNSTOWN, New York, is an hour west of Albany on the New York State Thruway. The hills of the Mohawk River Valley, in which it lies, are wrinkled rather than rolling. Occasionally a traveler gets a side view down the rows of a cornfield. But the soil is mostly too rocky to support anything but dairy cows.

This plain setting had its share of great events, thanks to the Indians who once lived there. Father Isaac Jogues, one of the seventeenth-century French Jesuits who tried to convert them, was martyred just across the river. The historian Francis Parkman cuts short a description of his torments with the remark that further details “would be as monotonous as revolting.”