Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley by Rob Harper (review)

You may think the history of the Ohio Valley between 1765 and 1795 is settled. Now comes Rob Harper’s Unsettling the West. He provides a clear and well-argued thesis while reframing the historical discussion from the very first pages when he employs the term colonists in place of the more traditional settlers. He refutes traditional views that maintain British imperial weakness bred frontier wildness, and that colonization of the region occurred from the “bottom-up” led by independent frontiersmen. His revisionist account concludes by questioning Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis.

Readers can rely on Harper’s concise prose to introduce a complex web of social, political, and economic evidence gleaned from primary and secondary sources as he presents a compelling argument in just 178 pages. The book’s six chapters unfold in chronological order drawing on historical examples from Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia to advance Harper’s argument that “Rather than springing from state absences, the horrors of the period stemmed from governments’ intrusive presence” (1).

Harper persistently reframes the way we understand government influence in the early Ohio Valley. For instance, he attributes the 1740s settlement of Redstone (Brownsville, Pennsylvania) to government policy. Rather than labeling its founder Thomas Cresap a squatter, Harper describes a “quasi-legal colonist” who sought to exploit the contradictory and changing policies of British North America in order to gain title to land. The quest for legally sound land titles is also key to Harper’s interpretation of Lord Dunmore’s War. Most surprisingly, even the absence of government advances Harper’s thesis that government contributed to frontier horrors. In his words, “The collapse of state authority [in 1776] deterred Indians and colonists from waging war” (94).

The book’s strongest chapter is “Horrors, 1780–82,” an analysis of the Gnaden hütten massacre. Accounts often blame rogue militiamen from southwestern Pennsylvania for the killing of ninety-six Christian Lenape in Ohio. However, Harper dismisses previous historians for fixating on the murderers and bystanders. Instead, he turns his attention to institutional factors. He contends that Gnadenhütten was not the act of rogue frontier militiamen but rather the result of government-sponsored warfare as “The resulting monster now escaped the control of the governments that created it” (141). He concludes, “Without their [government] support, even the most militant Indians and colonists lacked the means to wage war” (144).

This book was years in the making, starting with the author’s Ohio family roots. Much of Harper’s fifth chapter builds on a 2007 journal article he authored. The book also relies on his 2008 PhD dissertation at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in which he studied early social networks and coalitions in the Ohio Valley. However, time alone could not nourish such a well-argued revision to historical understanding of settlement in frontier Appalachia. Harper deserves credit for capably synthesizing numerous sources in this readable monograph.

In his conclusion, he questions whether hindsight has clouded historians’ views of “settlers” (174). The obvious answer is yes. However, hindsight is both vice and virtue. Harper’s account is a product of this era. He writes in a time that values his emphasis on the multiethnic, multilingual, and religiously diverse early Ohio Valley. His challenge to American Exceptionalism is not the shock it once might have been and his reinterpretation of state building in the frontier Ohio Valley concludes with a comparison to similar concepts in Mexico during 2014. These examples leave no doubt that Harper’s text features hindsight of its own.

Upper-level undergraduate syllabi could easily include Unsettling the West as an accessible case study for revisionism contrasted with a romanticized view, such as John A. Caruso’s The Appalachian Frontier, first published in 1959 and reprinted as recently as 2008. Maps illustrating the Ohio Valley support Harper’s text along with thorough endnotes and...