Susan A. Brewer's "The Best Land"

Susan A. Brewer was born in Oneida, New York, and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she taught the history of American foreign relations. She is the author of To Win the Peace and Why America Fights.

Brewer applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Best Land introduces two men, both in their twenties, who played a significant role in the early development of what would become my hometown, the city of Oneida in Madison County, New York. The first is Sidney Breese of New Jersey, a Yale graduate, lawyer, and employee of the Holland Land Company. The second is Angel Deferrier, the son of a poor French nobleman and the daughter of a colonial official who had made a fortune in Canada, was imprisoned in the Bastille for defrauding the state, and pardoned by Louis XV. Angel, who served Louis XVI as a royal bodyguard, fled during the French Revolution, contacted the Holland Land Company, and traveled from New York City to the frontier with Sidney in the 1790s.

At first, I thought that page 99 failed the test of revealing the whole book, but upon consideration I rather think that in some way it does. As was often the case in the local histories I have read, Natives are missing from this page. The only mention of Indigenous people concerns the image of two “savages” on the ancient coat of arms of Angel’s family. This symbolic, rather than actual, presence of Native people was a familiar one in my childhood. I had grown up in Oneida without realizing that Oneida Indians still lived on their ancestral lands. At school where we cheered on our team called “Oneida Indians,” the Oneidas, along with the rest of the Haudenosaunee or People of the Longhouse, had disappeared from our textbooks after the American Revolution.

As illustrated by Angel’s story, however, that was not true. When he came to Oneida territory, he followed in the footsteps of his forefathers by marrying a woman from a family of property and influence. In Angel’s case, he married Polly Denny, a Mohawk/Oneida woman. In contrast to Page 99, much of the rest of the book is about generations of Polly’s family. For over a century, Polly’s family lived on what would become my family’s farm, called “the best land” by my grandfather whose parents had bought it from Angel and Polly’s grandchildren.

Angel Deferrier and Sidney Breese, along with a multitude of land speculators, turnpike, canal, and railroad developers, settlers, and squatters, had come to Oneida territory in search of wealth, opportunity, a home. The Oneidas, including members of Polly’s family, tried strategy after strategy to hold on to land guaranteed by the United States that New York State acquired using deceit, corruption, and illegally made treaties. They initially secured help from Sidney and Angel, but both men eventually took an active part in the dispossession of the Oneidas. Remembered as gentlemen with elegant manners and gracious homes, Sidney and Angel built their prosperity on broken promises. Page 99 introduces these key characters in The Best Land, a history of settler colonialism and Indigenous perseverance filled with love and betrayal.

Learn more about The Best Land at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Why America Fights.

--Marshal Zeringue