A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Metis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737-1832 (review)

A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Métis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737–1832. By Lucy Eldersveld Murphy. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. xviii + 233 pp., introduction, maps, notes, index. $47.50 cloth.)

Lucy Eldersveld Murphy has written a very satisfying and imaginative study of the economic and social transformation of the multiethnic Fox–Wisconsin River sector of what might be called the eighteenth-century world system. Attending to the complexities of a geographically defined region instead of concentrating on a people or an event, this book has the virtue of presenting a suggestive and intriguing history. The author rhetorically asks why the story of the relationship between Europeans and Indians is one of segregation when there were important periods of integration, accommodation, articulation, and cultural synthesis; she then goes on to tell the story of those dialogical processes.

Mid-eighteenth-century Wisconsin, especially the sector defined by the watercourses connecting Green Bay and the Mississippi River via the Wisconsin and Rock rivers, was already a cosmopolitan region well before the American settler project commenced. This period after the Iroquois wars was one of ethnic diversification in this borderland, as shown by the presence of tribal groups—Sauk, Mesquakie, Winnebago (a.k.a. HoChunk), Menominees, Potawatomis, Ojibwas, and Ottawas—Francophonic Métis, Scots, Irish, English, and Americans, both Anglo- and African. Over the course of the century Murphy deals with, the fortune of the indigenous and indigenized would decline severely as the area came to be dominated by the last wave of immigrants who would culturally and socially homogenize it.

Early on (3–4) Murphy announces her objectives: to explore the gender relationships, degrees of multiculturalism, and community conflict and cooperation in the lands between Green Bay and the Mississippi River between the end of the Fox Wars in 1737 and the Black Hawk War of 1832; to outline the economic history of this culturally complex and heterogeneous region for this century-long period; and finally, to recover the voices of the traditionally silent in this history. I found that she achieved all three of her objectives.

The book is organized into three nearly equal sections: the first deals with the fur trade and the emergence of mixed blood or creole communities, the second with lead mining, and the third with the cultural homogenization of the region and the removal of Indians as viable political and economic actors. Through her discussion of Native American villages we see how the French were effectively integrated into the Algonquian and Siouan worlds as Indians resisted domination by refusing to relocate in order to facilitate French aims, by supporting illegal traders, and by engaging in revolt. Women played crucial roles as respected producers of marketable items, as interpreters, and as mediators between Indian and non-Indian worlds. Traditional political decentralization and local autonomy frustrated the imperial aims of the French in the middle of the eighteenth century and generated a creolized culture.

I appreciated the discussion of indigenous war as a kind of internal contradiction and dynamic within Indian societies that made domination difficult but that also made the highly and widely desired peace illusive. On the one hand, memories of the devasation of the Iroquois wars motivated a deep desire for peace. On the other, the low-intensity conflict that was normal between Indian nations—structurally analogous to the "flowery wars" between city-states in the Central Mexican highlands—was an essential means of reproducing society. Though this conflict was a problem for the French—discussed most extensively in Richard White's The Middle Ground, from which Murphy learned a great deal—they made the most of it, deploying young Indian warriors in intercolonial warfare. So did the older Indian leadership make the most of it, in the manipulation of alliances.

Murphy's focus on Indian autonomy instead of dependence results in a narrative that...