Greg Parkes

Toward Home Greg Parkes

The Palatine Germans were penniless and disease ridden when they landed in New York in 1710. After two years of bondage, the survivors are in a scarcely better condition when 700 of them choose to walk 80 miles through the trackless wilderness to the Schoharie Valley. The Englishman James Schoolcraft and the Palatine Anna Kammer join this migration, experiencing all of its perils, its tribulations, and its triumphs. They anticipate that life will be hard, but they do not anticipate that the greatest danger to their community would come not from a fulminating Governor or from the wary Indians, or even from the prejudices of their neighbors. It would come from within. This, the first volume of the Schoolcraft Saga, tells the story of the Palatines, the largest single group to arrive on our shores during the Colonial period. We are led down one of the many fascinating byways of American History and encounter some of the people who live there, folks who, by the mere living, write history.