Drums Along The Mohawk Author:Edmonds, Walter D. To those readers who may have felt some curiosity about the actual occurrences in the Mohawk Valley during the Revolution, I should like to say that I have been as faithful to the scene and time and place as study and affection could help me to be. A novelist, if he chooses, has a greater opportunity for faithful presentation of a bygone time t... more »han an historian, for the historian is compelled to a presentation of cause and effect and feels, as a rule, that he must present them through the lives and characters of "famous" or "historical" figures. My concern, however, has been with life as it was; as you or I, our mothers or our wives, our brothers and husbands and uncles, might have experienced it. To do that I have attempted to be as accurate in the minutiae of living as in the broader historical features. Food, crops, game and weather played an important and ever-active part in the Mohawk Valley. As far as possible I have checked them through old journals, histories and dispatches, so that, before I was well embarked in the writing of the book, I knew when snow was falling, and how deep it was; how high the river came, and when there ws rain. Naturally, for spaces of time, no data were available, and there I had to rely on my own knowledge of our climate....« less