Borderlands

“Hudson River from Albany to Fort Edward, shewing the situation of the several Posts between those places, 1757,” detail

HM 15409, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Saratoga as Borderlands

What relationships do you value?

Borderlands…it sounds like a romanticized historical fiction or an action game. The reality is a very different story whose telling is essential for the Battles of Saratoga.

A working definition might be “An area or region between two or more national, cultural, or societal groups where the population experiences opportunity, socio-cultural blending, and sometimes fluctuating political or military control. Its resources and travel routes favor settlement and movement to and through the area.”

The greater Saratoga area— Schuylerville, NY today—had all that and more in the 1600s and 1700s. Its borderland nature was largely established by the prominence of the Iroquois Confederacy (especially the Mohawk nation) and their interactions and conflicts with other Native peoples, including the Abenaki, Mohican, and Algonquian nations. Its abundant hunting, fishing, and trapping, and readily-traveled intersecting waterways—the Hudson River, the tributary Fish Creek from Saratoga Lake, and the tributary Wood Creek coming from very near Lake Champlain—accentuated the area’s importance.

As the Dutch, French, and British entered the area in the 1600s and 1700s, they joined the story. Opportunity abounded, as anonymous traders, trappers, merchants, and mill-owners built names and lives for themselves. Landowners, like Philip Schuyler, acquired more land, wealth, and influence. One enslaved boy, born to Abenaki and African parents, leveraged his circumstances (captured in a 1745 Canadian and Indian raid) into distinguished Continental Army service.

Business dealings with Native populations, especially the Iroquois, had great value in terms of profit and developing alliances. And as wars came and went—like the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-67), Queen Anne’s War (1702-13), and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63)—those individual relationships and higher-level alliances were critical for survival, success, and victory.

Enter: the War for American Independence (1775-83), and two connected battles in this critical borderland…the Battles of Saratoga (Autumn 1777).

How do you build valued relationships?