Douw Fonda, Major Jelles Fonda and Captain Adam Fonda are frequently referred to in the non-fiction novel In the Valley'(1889) by Harold Frederic. "The original Danascara mansion sat on the other side of the road, closer to the Mohawk River than the current house. It was attacked in 1780 during a suprise raid by Torys and Indians who came down the Danascara Creek, between the high walls of the gorge, to avoid detection. Colonel Visher (Vischer, Fisher), who fought in the Battle of Oriskany, survived the raid and in 1795 built the house that is now for sale. The original house is the setting for Harold Frederic’s novel, In The Valley. Frederic was from Utica and hob-nobbed with the likes of Mark Twain. His name has slipped into obscurity, although his novel The Damnation Of Theron Ware is still considered a minor masterpiece. Read Frederic’s article, The Mohawk Valley During The Revolution from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. / Volume 55, Issue 326 July 1877." Upstream. A Mohawk Valley Blogzine.
Douw Fonda is also in the novels by Robert W. Chambers dealing with Mohawk Valley and Tryon County history. From the Preface of 'The Reckoning': "The author's intention is to treat, in a series (Cardigan Series) of four or five romances, that part of the war for independence which particularly affected the great landed families of Northern New York: the Johnsons, represented by Sir William, Sir John, Guy Johnson, and Colonel Claus; the notorious Butlers, father and son; the Schuylers, Van Rensselaers, and others."
Drums Along the Mohawk is a historical novel of the American Revolution written by Walter D. Edmonds.
Published in 1936 and extremely popular, it was made into a film in 1939. The setting is the Mohawk River Valley during the American Revolution, which was subjected to numerous raids by the British, American Tories, and their Iroquois allies. Included in both works is a fictitious representation of the siege of Fort Stanwix. In the movie, Henry Fonda played pioneer settler Gil Martin, with Claudette Colbert as his wife Magdalena "Lana" Martin. Some of the main characters, including the Martins, are ficticious, but the novel remains historically accurate. The scalping of Douw Fonda is mentioned in Chapter VIII - McKlennar's: 1780 - 3. In The Valley, p. 513, "Sir John brought five hundred men across the Sacandaga flows. He's struck the valley by Johnstown. They say he's burned down every house in Caughnawaga. He's killed fifty or sixty people. Old Fonda that used to be his neighbor, eighty years old, scalped on his front door."
Albert Fonda is featured in the fictional novel Miss Bishop (1933) by Bess Streeter Aldrich - "Ella Bishop came to college a healthy, country-bred girl, alive to ever fresh sensation, with an infinite capacity for work, love, and understanding. Her abundant energy and devotion to learning made her a superior student and later a gifted teacher. But her smile concealed more than one youthful tragedy, and tragedy did not stop with youth. Albert Fonda is in the storyline from start to finish, as a grade school classmate and then as a college professor of astronomy. The 1941 movie, 'Cheers for Miss Bishop', was based on this novel." (although the character is not named Fonda)
Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen (2006) "Old fans and newcomers alike should delight in Hiaasen's 11th novel (after 2004's Skinny Dip), another hilarious Florida romp. The engaging and diverse screwball cast includes Boyd Shreave, a semicompetent telemarketer; Shreave's mistress and co-worker, Eugenie Fonda; Honey Santana, a mercurial gadfly who ends up on the other end of one of Shreave's pitches for Florida real estate; and Sammy Tigertail, half Seminole, who at novel's start must figure out what to do with the body of a tourist who dies of a heart attack on Sammy's airboat after being struck by a harmless water snake." |
