The Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians (review)

In this splendidly researched and carefully crafted study, Amy Schutt sketches the history of the much-abused Delaware Indians from the early 1600s, when they lived in the Delaware and Hudson River valleys, to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the remnants of this once-influential native group were scattered to the four winds. According to Schutt, early Delaware cultural life revolved around four features: living in localized small communities; membership in complex overlapping kin groups; selection of respected leaders, or sachems; and the performance of integrative rituals. All four sustaining elements were put to the test in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Delaware confronted multiple challenges to their existence on the troubled and often violent Indian-white frontier. The threats came in many forms: catastrophic epidemics, war, confusing treaty agreements, factionalism, and unreliable allies (mainly the Iroquois). But mostly it was frontier settlers' insatiable appetite for Indian land that pushed the Delaware ever westward. By the mid-1700s several communities were located in the Ohio country under the religious tutelage of Morovian missionaries.

Despite these migrations, Schutt argues that the Delaware maintained a keen, if evolving, sense of themselves as a people and continued to exert great political influence among their Indian neighbors. In the face of political and demographic realities on the Pennsylvania and Ohio frontiers, the Delaware increasingly emphasized several elements in their cultural toolkit: a willingness to absorb remnants of neighboring tribes, skill at building alliances, and a gift for mediating conflicts and peace-making. These adaptive strategies served them well until the American Revolution, when dissension among allies, tribal factionalism, and frontier Indian-hating overwhelmed them. In March 1782 a Pennsylvania militia marched to the Morovian towns of Gnadenhütten and Salem, imprisoned the mostly Christian occupants, and then proceeded to massacre some ninety Indians, including thirty-five children. Twelve years later, the Delaware were allied with the Shawnee, Miami, Wyandots, and other groups where they were handily defeated at the battle of Fallen Timbers. After the War of 1812, they were pushed across the Mississippi.

Early in the study Schutt writes that her original intent was to tell the story of the Delaware focusing on the themes of identity and ethnogenesis. She soon concluded, however, that the remoteness and inconclusiveness of her sources made such an endeavor problematic if not impossible. After considering both the complexity of crosscurrents impinging on the Delaware and the range of political and cultural adaptions adopted, one can appreciate the author's dilemma. (The reader cannot help but wonder, for example, how the successive influences of the Delawares' traditional belief in spirit beings, the visions of the legendary Delaware prophet called Neolin, and the Christian missionaries—all discussed by Schutt—interacted and figured over time in the tribes' spiritual outlook.) Schutt's decision to view the Delaware experience through the lens of adaptive survival, principally their skill at negotiating agreements, was a much more manageable inquiry. The result is an exceptionally fine study, one indispensable for understanding both Delaware history and the dynamics of the Pennsylvania-Ohio frontier.