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by J. L. Miller (Author)
Sixty years before the American Revolution, John Harper Sr. brought his family to America with the same expectations and dreams every immigrant wishes for his children. Few families, then and now, could ever match the accomplishments James Harper's progeny achieved in their first three American generations. Through several wars fought on different frontier fronts, the Harpers fought against French grenadiers, British regulars, German Hessians, and Iroquois and Abenaki warriors. From Maine and Massachusetts to Connecticut and on to New York, they helped tame one frontier after another. Their military careers would serve as a means to an end to help them reach their ultimate goal of owning land, and lots of it.
John Harper Sr. was barely in his teens when he crossed the North Atlantic with his family and settled on Maine's Kennebec frontier at the height of the Anglo/Abenaki Wars. He mustered into a militia company and impressed his superiors with his ability to excel at frontier soldiering. His willingness to learn from his company's Mohawk scouts accustomed him to their culture, language, and way of waging war. This was to be the attitude he would instill in his four sons who would use it to help him realize his dreams of landownership. The period between the French and Indian War and the Revolution was a time of incredible opportunities for those who dared to risk it all for a patch of land in a wilderness fraught with danger and privation. The Harpers would not be content with just a few paternal acres on a riverfront homestead lot, setting their sights instead on building an empire of thousands of acres. Incredibly, they did indeed succeed in doing just that.
Chronicling the trials and trails of the Harper family's three generational migration through New England to New York and on to Ohio, from the 1720s to the War of 1812, is the subject of this book. It embodies this one remarkable family's wars, political intrigues, and transgressions as a reflection of America's frontier zeitgeist and turbulent transformation from colony to country. The contributions of the members of this family of Scots-Irish immigrants to the success of the American Revolution and colonization of the western frontiers were profoundly significant. Viewed through the bright light and retrospective gaze of history, however, some of their achievements might seem tainted by their dearth of ethical concerns. The suffering and tragedies experienced by them and so many of their kinsmen who lived through those momentous times is worthy of our commemoration, if only to remind us of how indebted to them we truly are. Maps, portraits and other illustrations, and an index to full names, places, and subjects add to the value of this work.
