Salute To Courage; New England's Most Exciting Historical Novel [From the Dust Jacket]

Orange, Massachusetts: The Enterprise and Journal, 1966. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Masha Arms (Author photograph). [4],m 272 pages Endpaper map. DJ is in a plastic sleeve. Minor edge soiling. Signed with sentiment by the author on page facing title page. Notation reads. With best wishes William T. Arms. Historical fiction set in Massachusetts during the French and Indian Wars. Salute to Courage is an exciting action story that mirrors the struggles of the pioneer settlers on the New England frontier during the final decade of the French and Indian wars. The major war events introduced in this work include Braddock's Defeat, the Fall of Fort William Henry, the capture of Louisburg, of Fort Duquesne, of Ticonderoga, and of Quebec all show the influence of each of these events on the lives of the frontiersmen in their isolated stockaded forts. Colonel Ephraim William Lord Jeffrey Amherst, Robert Rogers all appear in this work, as does Abigail Crouch. William Tyler "Billy" Arms was born in 1904 in Deerfield, and died in 1970. William's varied career began as a columnist for the New York Times. He later worked for the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. His publications include The History of Leyden Massachusetts, 1676-1959 (1959) and Salute to Courage (1966). The French and Indian War (1754-1763) was a theater of the Seven Years' War, which pitted the North American colonies of the British Empire against those of the French, each side being supported by various Native American tribes. At the start of the war, the French colonies had a population of roughly 60,000 settlers, compared with 2 million in the British colonies. The outnumbered French particularly depended on their native allies. Two years into the French and Indian War, in 1756, Great Britain declared war on France, beginning the worldwide Seven Years' War. Many view the French and Indian War as being merely the American theater of this conflict; however, in the United States the French and Indian War is viewed as a singular conflict which was not associated with any European war. French Canadians call it the guerre de la Conquête ('War of the Conquest'). The British Pitt government fell due to disastrous campaigns in 1757, including a failed expedition against Louisbourg and the Siege of Fort William Henry; this last was followed by the Natives torturing and massacring their colonial victims. William Pitt came to power and significantly increased British military resources in the colonies at a time when France was unwilling to risk large convoys to aid the limited forces that they had in New France, preferring to concentrate their forces against Prussia and its allies who were now engaged in the Seven Years' War in Europe. Between 1758 and 1760, the British military launched a campaign to capture French Canada. They succeeded in capturing territory in surrounding colonies and ultimately the city of Quebec (1759). The following year the British were victorious in the Montreal Campaign in which the French ceded Canada in accordance with the Treaty of Paris (1763). France also ceded its territory east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, as well as French Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to its ally Spain in compensation for Spain's loss to Britain of Spanish Florida. (Spain had ceded Florida to Britain in exchange for the return of Havana, Cuba.) France's colonial presence north of the Caribbean was reduced to the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, confirming Great Britain's position as the dominant colonial power in northern America.