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  • This Torrent of Indians: War on the Southern Frontier, 1715–1728 by Larry E. Ivers
  • Georgia Carley
This Torrent of Indians: War on the Southern Frontier, 1715–1728. By Larry E. Ivers. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. viii, 292. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-61117-606-3; cloth, $54.95, ISBN 978-1-61117-605-6.)

Larry E. Ivers has produced a detailed military history of the Yamasee War, the drawn-out conflict between South Carolina colonists and a number of southeastern Native American groups including the Yamasees, Creeks, and Catawbas in the years 1715–1728. Ivers’s focus on the geography and physical tactics of the war, including troop movements, battle locations, and built defenses, is an important addition to the existing literature. Earlier social and political analyses of the Yamasee War focused on the motivations and grievances that led to and prolonged the conflict, rather than the practicalities by which the war was fought.

Ivers takes the reader immediately into the war; his first chapter vividly describes the cross-country ride made by two South Carolina Indian traders to warn Charles Town of the arising conflict. The chapter sets the tone for Ivers’s study. After three background chapters that provide the colonial and Native American contexts leading up to the war, the remainder of Ivers’s seventeen chapters take the reader through the conflict month by month, and sometimes even day by day. Drawing on the South Carolina Commons House Journals and a variety of other colonially produced documents, Ivers teases out South Carolina and Native American tactical responses during the ongoing conflict.

Ivers’s attention to location is a great strength of his work. Using wills, journals, acts of the South Carolina assembly, and over fifty maps, as well as his own personal reconnaissance, Ivers reconstructs the exact locations of forts, plantations, towns (both South Carolinian and Native American), and battles whose locations have been obscured over time. Ivers transparently explains how he determined each location in his text and in detailed end-notes. Along with a number of useful maps, Ivers describes all locations in relation to current-day landmarks such as highways and cities, so that readers can trace the movements of the war on a map of present-day South Carolina.

Ivers aims to produce a “detailed narrative and an analysis of military operations” and, within his method, to “avoid showing favoritism or allegiance” to any group involved in the war (pp. vii, viii). On the first, Ivers is entirely successful, but on the second, elements of organization and habits of [End Page 147] phrasing work to align his writing with South Carolina’s perspective on the conflict. Ivers relies on a documentary record that was principally produced by South Carolina colonists; his chapters’ contents reflect his sources. In other small ways, Ivers positions his narrative in the South Carolinian stance. For example, the chapters are dated according to colonial time markers, such as chapter 5, “Easter Weekend.” Phrasing that includes the term warrior to refer to all Native American men and describing Native American motivations as a lust for war mirror the colonists’ opinion of their Native American opponents (p. 39). Nevertheless, Ivers mitigates this slant elsewhere in the text; for example, when listing the South Carolina traders killed in the first wave of the war, he notes each trader’s alleged or confirmed abuses, such as beating, killing, or cheating Native Americans.

Ivers offers a wealth of detail regarding South Carolina’s military operations during the Yamasee War, from the Commons House’s efforts to supply the war to methods of fort construction. For students and readers unfamiliar with the particulars of eighteenth-century warfare, details such as the precise methods of loading a flintlock musket may be particularly helpful. For scholars of this period of South Carolina history, Ivers’s careful reconstruction of the locations of the war will be especially useful.

Georgia Carley
Queen’s University
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