The Boundaries between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest, 1750–1850 (review)

The Old Northwest was first subjected to extensive historical analysis early in the twentieth century when a generation of post-Turnerian scholarship focused on its traditions of democracy and institution building. In the past fifteen years interest in the region has been revived, now with a focus on cross-cultural relations and the complexities of lived experience in a frontier setting. The eleven essays in the volume under review fall squarely into this recent tradition. They vary widely in quality, originality, and persuasiveness, but the best of them are engaging and imaginative and suggest promising avenues for additional research. All the essays deal with relations between Indians and Euroamericans. One striking feature of the volume is its expansive time frame. Ranging from the era of the Seven Years' War to that of internal improvements and Indian removal, it brings together topics that are rarely considered within a single pair of covers.

The first four essays deal with the Seven Years' War and its aftermath. Recent scholarship sees the Ohio Indians as an inchoate group from multiple backgrounds that was beginning to act together for some purposes; often it does not do enough to disaggregate the motives of those constituent groups. Ian K. Steele and Daniel P. Barr give close attention to the motives of Shawnees and Delawares, respectively, in entering the Seven Years' War and in so doing offer important clarifications to the war's origins. David Dixon's essay pushes too far in the other direction by arguing that the uprisings known as Pontiac's Rebellion, which came at war's end, offer proof of a new ethnicity shared by the Ohio and Detroit Indians. While certain concerns united these groups, they remained permanently divided in important ways as well. Matthew C. Ward persuasively counters Gregory Dowd's claim that British officers were the principal cause of Indian grievances after the Seven Years' War by highlighting officers' role as mediators and protectors of Indian interests—though he does so, curiously, without noting his disagreement with Dowd.

Lisa Brooks presents a nuanced, persuasive account of the disagreement between the Mohawk Joseph Brant and Mahican Hendrick Aupaumut in their efforts to lead the Ohio and Detroit Indians to a workable settlement with the United States following the Revolution. Rooting each man's vision in a geographic analogy that drew on his own people's traditions and historical experiences, Brooks powerfully illustrates the complexities of their attempts to mediate peace on the post-Revolutionary frontier. Frazer Dorian McGlinchey highlights the disparity between the ideal vision of Marietta, Ohio, articulated by the leaders of the Ohio Company and the messy actuality of their efforts. Donald H. Gaff emphasizes the fluid boundaries of identity and experience in the lives of Little Turtle, Jean Baptiste Richardville, and William Wells. Bruce P. Smith offers a highly suggestive analysis of the ways criminal law was used to adjudicate cases of cross-cultural homicide on the Illinois frontier. Far from being the equitable, well-ordered system that some scholars have argued for, Smith's analysis of two such cases suggests that frontier dwellers, both Indian and Euroamerican, resorted all too easily to extralegal violence to resolve their disputes.

Phyllis Gernhardt, Ginette Aley, and Thomas J. Lappas consider the era of removal. Gernhardt's essay examines the experiences of Potawatomi and Miami Indians in the vicinity of Fort Wayne, where the United States trading factory accumulated debts that the federal government could leverage to secure parcels of land. In the 1830s and 1840s, after the factory system was abandoned, private traders were briefly able to do essentially the same thing, serving as middlemen who accumulated Indian debt and then negotiated land transfers with the government. Aley uses the example of the Wabash and Erie Canal to highlight the importance of internal improvements in converting the landscape of...