Walter D. Edmonds; Author of ‘Drums Along the Mohawk’

Walter D. Edmonds, author of three historical novels, including the best-known “Drums Along the Mohawk,” that were made into motion pictures starring Henry Fonda, has died. He was 94.

Edmonds, who published his final novel three years ago, died Saturday in Utica, N.Y.

He wrote about the area he knew best, upstate New York near the Erie Canal and the Adirondack Mountains where he grew up. His 1936 book “Drums Along the Mohawk” detailed the lives of pioneer farmers along the Mohawk River during the American Revolution.

The book remained on the best-seller list for two years and in the late 1930s was second in popularity only to “Gone With the Wind.”

Director John Ford made the book into a film for 20th Century Fox in 1939, starring Fonda and Claudette Colbert.

But that was not the first of Edmonds’ books for the studio or Fonda. The author’s first novel, published shortly after he graduated from Harvard University under the title “Rome Haul” in 1929, was turned into a play and then Fonda’s first film in 1935.

Retitled “The Farmer Takes a Wife,” the story was about a farm family living near the Erie Canal in the 1800s. The studio remade the film as a musical in 1953, starring Betty Grable and Dale Robertson.

A third Edmonds book, “Chad Hanna,” which was about 1800s circus life in central New York, was made into a motion picture starring Fonda and Dorothy Lamour in 1940. That book began as a series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post called “Red Wheels Rolling.”

Edmonds wrote for young people as well as adults. “The Matchlock Gun,” which was about a 10-year-old boy defending his home against Indians in colonial New York, won the Newbery Medal for Children’s Literature in 1942.

The author also garnered the Boys’ Clubs of America award in 1955 for “Hound Dog Moses and the Promised Land,” and a National Book Award in 1976 for “Bert Breen’s Barn.”

When Edmonds wrote about four women captives of Indians in 1778 in his 1947 book “In the Hands of the Senecas,” The Times book review noted: “Good history is here and sound psychology. . . . It makes good reading.”

Reviewing “The South African Quirt” in 1985, then Times arts editor Charles Champlin hailed Edmonds as “a very able writer indeed.” Although the book was aimed at young readers, Champlin said, adults too could “find pleasure and reward in Edmonds’ brief, dramatic chronicle of disillusion and deliverance.”

That book, along with Edmonds’ last, “Tales My Father Never Told,” offered largely biographical stories of Edmonds’ relationship with his demanding lawyer father.

Collectively, Edmonds’ books are considered the richest body of fiction about the time and region since the works of James Fenimore Cooper.