to ever flood the inland sea
that swallows every day the sun,
which every day resumes the play.
The current that carried Onondaga trappers, traders, and Hiawatha to an inland sea was merged into the global current at the rise of the 17th century, when France sent Champlain to find anchorage more temperate than already had at Quebec.
Guided by Algonquin and Huron allies, proud adversaries of the Onondaga and Haudenosaunee, Champlain besieged the enemy of his allies, and thus brewed new bad blood from ancient European and native American passions.
Threatened and made jealous by France’s American fur trade, in 1722, rival England fortified a marketplace at the mouth of the Oswego, with the reluctant assistance of the enemy of the allies of their familiar European foe.
Then, in the midst of global war between a French alliance and a British alliance, French General Montcalm chased the British from Oswego in 1756, a victory soon reversed in the Atlantic, where the Union Jack and Jolly Roger ruled the waves.
In 1766, Ottawa warrior Pontiac came to Fort Ontario to acknowledge British conquest of land he had no right to surrender. With scores of chiefs, braves, and soldiers paraded in full regalia, that peace conference was an empty show of force, a veritable photo-op.
Appalled by the ease of Montcalm’s rout, the British king tightened the screws that secured his own American crown; deaf to good counsel, he executed orders intolerable enough to provoke, in 1775, the shot heard round the world.
Overlooked by the 1783 Treaty of Paris that documents America’s victorious birth, Oswego remained a British place until 1796, when the Jay Treaty took effect and British forces evacuated their fortified trading port on the banks of the river.
to the first wave of the next war.
History etches itself; scribes merely show
where battlers battle and tally the score.
The birth of a nation is the first chapter of a new literature. The renewal of British forts by the U.S. drew Ensign Fenimore Cooper to Oswego, and now her river flows also between the bound banks of his book “The Pathfinder, or the Inland Sea.”
While Cooper studied maritime war and spun yarns, Oswegonians, their livelihoods tied to shipping, rose openly to oppose an embargo ordered by President Jefferson, who hoped a boycott of British goods would solve the wanton piracy of British guns.
Instead, the failed uprising of my ancient neighbors led to the Insurrection Act of 1807; England launched and lost another war, which history notes for British destruction of the White House, and debut of the American hymn, The Star Spangled Banner.
As Civil War loomed, Underground Railway supporter and John Brown patron, Garrit Smith, built Oswego’s public library; once the fight began, Dr. Mary Walker treated the wounded and dying, the first woman honored by Congress with its Medal of Honor.
Three wars later, peaceful use was found for Fort Ontario, when President Roosevelt ordered it transformed into a shelter for 982 survivors of the holocaust in Germany and Poland.
for yearly snowmelt and intermittent rain, carves bays where
people trade, raise crops, preserve peace, or make war.
As piracy is the bastard son of trade, so war is born when diplomacy
is traded for savagery. Neither nation nor clan knows faith, hope, or
charity, traits exclusive to persons, who gather and trade one by one.
In 1945, weaponized science made Imperial Japan surrender to the American republic, after which our peace dividend has been squandered, our nation re-divided, by anti-republican forces that fear government of the people, by the people, for the people.
On Jan6, followers of an imaginary monarch beseiged the U.S. capitol, to display Trump’s face and leave organic traces of their own character smeared on the walls of the building that houses the American experiment in self-governance.
Patriotic Americans now gather by Oswego’s river since a fake king began the second destruction of the White House; they come to discharge those feelings of anger that have upset the faith, hope, and charity that runs like a current through America.
Dave Read