American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State

Introduction

In the heart of North America, the continent’s three greatest rivers come together. As the crow flies, only about 135 miles separate the points where the Missouri and the Ohio join the Mississippi . Together, the three rivers drain a vast portion of North America, uniting waters from west, north, and east on a journey to the south in a region that I have designated the “American confluence.” This book examines the history of the lower Missouri valley and the whole of the “confluence region” as it extended back on both sides of the Mississippi, principally, though not exclusively, between the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio rivers. The boundaries of the confluence region are left deliberately vague, for the area was characterized by its fluid borders through much of the period under study. Focusing on the last two-thirds of the eighteenth century and the first third of the nineteenth, the book explores the meetings of peoples, or frontiers, that evolved within the area where the rivers met. This history of multiple frontiers accents the American confluence’s transition from a place of overlapping borderlands to one of oppositional border states. In its original incarnation, this book pursued a single frontier demarcated along more conventional lines. It began as a history of “frontier Missouri,” one in a series of new surveys of the frontier experiences of trans-Appalachian states. When I took on the assignment, I anticipated a straightforward project: to trace how the area that became the state of Missouri emerged from its precolonial origins, how a frontier opened when colonists contested with natives for occupancy, and how its development led to its admission as one of the United States, the expulsion of Indian peoples, and the closing of the Missouri frontier. Telling the hisIntroduction tory of frontier Missouri this way made for an obvious sequel to the book that I had written on frontier Kentucky. After all, the westward migrations of Kentuckians had landed many in Missouri , including Daniel Boone, who in my previous book had served as a synecdoche for pioneers moving across the Appalachians . Initially, I conceived the Missouri book as the next chapter in “a greater western history” that narrated and connected the conquest, colonization, and consolidation of one American West after another. Since my conception of a greater western history posited that patterns of conquest, colonization, and consolidation repeated themselves as American expansion proceeded westward, Missouri seemed the best place to look for a replay of what had happened to its east.1 But a few years of reading, researching, and teaching have revised this book’s ambitions and directions. Of great import has been my collaboration on a recently published world history textbook. Writing world history prompted me to rethink the framework for understanding the history of frontier Missouri. From the perspective of world history, the area that became the state of Missouri has little significance if it is only one of fifty such chapters in the expansion of the United States. Within a world history, what made Missouri matter were the connections between the experiences of its peoples and those who occupied frontiers, not just within the present-day United States but across the Americas and beyond. Instead of contributing to a “greater western history,” the project became an opportunity to explore what Herbert Bolton termed a “greater American history .” And so the history of one state (within the history of one nation-state) evolved into a more complicated contemplation, involving multiple polities and overlapping colonialisms and speaking to a comparative and common history of the Americas. Framed this way, patterns and repetitions that moved from east to west lose their exclusivity. Instead, processes of conquest, colonization , and consolidation can be seen to travel along multiple trajectories.2 No matter how broadly framed or variously vectored, writing a frontier history for one state remains an obstacle-filled enterprise . First are the problems associated with the concept of fronIntroduction  xiv tier. Despite its frequent usage, historians do not really agree about the definition of frontier. Over time, the term has acquired many meanings, and historians have employed it promiscuously. At best, say critics, vague and shifting definitions diminish analytical precision; at worst, the frontier is fatally wounded by its ethnocentric heritage. Of concern, too, are the issues raised by taking state boundaries to demarcate frontier histories. For much of the period that falls...