Fort William Henry, America's early frontier fort at the southern end of Lake George, New York, was a flashpoint for conflict between the British and French empires in America. The fort is perhaps best known as the site of a massacre of British soldiers by Native Americans allied with the French that took place in 1757. Over the past decade, new and exciting archeological findings, in tandem with modern forensic methods, have changed our view of life at the fort prior to the massacre, by providing physical evidence of the role that Native Americans played on both sides of the conflict. Intertwining recent revelations with those of the past, Starbuck creates a lively narrative beginning with the earliest Native American settlement on Lake George. He pays special attention to the fort itself: its reconstruction in the 1950s, the major discoveries of the 1990s, and the archeological disclosures of the past few years. He further discusses the importance of forensic anthropology in uncovering the secrets of the past, reviews key artifacts discovered at the fort, and considers the relevance of Fort William Henry and its history in the twenty-first century. Three appendixes treat exhibits since the 1950s; foodways; and General Daniel Webb's surrender letter of August 17, 1757.

An armed uprising. A conspiracy. An assassination. A hanging. These events, starting with the crushing of Jacobite rebels at Culloden in 1746 and culminating six years later in the so-called Appin Murder, provided Robert Louis Stevenson with the plot of his enduringly popular novel Kidnapped. But truth can be every bit as dramatic as fiction. And never more so than in this account of what lay behind the killing of government officer Colin Campbell by a hidden gunman on a May afternoon in 1752. Campbell was on his way to evict rebels from the Ardshiel estate near Appin, and Britain's rulers saw in his murder a terrorist act committed by Jacobite survivors of Culloden. When the alleged killer evaded a Scotland-wide manhunt and escaped abroad, politicians insisted someone had to pay for Campbell's death.The sacrificial lamb was James Stewart, a Culloden veteran who had been organising resistance to Campbell's evictions. James was found guilty in the show trial that followed and was hanged close to the murder scene. His body was left suspended there for years as a grim warning to anyone else thinking of challenging the new order the British state had imposed on the Jacobite Highlands.