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  • Man vs. Wild
  • Andrew Cayton (bio)
Meredith Mason Brown. Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. xxii + 424 pp. Illustrations, maps, chronology, notes, bibliographic note, and index. 34.95.
Claiborne A. Skinner. The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xvi + 202 pp. Maps, glossary, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. 50.00 (cloth); 25.00 (paper).

Academic historians concerned with the impact of their collective work on well-entrenched popular narratives of American history will find little to reassure them in Meredith Mason Brown's Frontiersman and Claiborne A. Skinner's The Upper Country. While both authors are smart men who have read widely in the extensive scholarship on the interior of North America in the long eighteenth century, neither Brown nor Skinner seems comfortable with the questions, assumptions, or conclusions of that scholarship. Indeed, their references to recent work on American Indians, social history, environmental history, and the problematic aspects of the term "frontier" are at best awkward asides in lively stories of individual heroics and the making of "America." Brown and Skinner so completely accept the rightness, as well as the inevitability, of the United States that they cannot imagine an alternative outcome. In their view, the republic emerged and prospered largely through the actions of autonomous, ordinary white men going about the business of living their lives as decently as possible. Before as well as after the American Revolution, imperial efforts to coerce free men into acting against their local and individual interests were acts of colossal arrogance doomed to failure because, they believe, the acts violated the essential character of North America.

Over the past several decades, academic historians have systematically dismantled this narrative. Because late twentieth-century scholars were initially more interested in resistance to power than in the exercise of power, they tended to highlight the ability of American Indians, enslaved Africans, and women—as well as French, Dutch, and Spanish settlers on the ground—to ignore, defy, or redirect efforts to control or construct them against their will. Soon, they were detailing the ways in which people consciously exploited [End Page 191] conflicts among Europeans to fashion places in between—middle grounds or borderlands. These concerns fed into a growing interest in the nature of power itself. Many recent studies of empire have stressed its tentative and ironic qualities and the extent to which it existed in relentless negotiations between colonial peoples and imperial centers. A major outcome of this revisionism has been to precipitate a movement away from national history to continental (and/or Atlantic history) as an organizing principle of historical scholarship. If in the contingent and contested history of North America, the emergence of the United States was a hugely significant development, it was also a major episode in a much larger narrative of continental, indeed global, history. Despite the obvious familiarity of Brown and Skinner with this recent historiography, they gesture toward it more than they actually engage it.

Frontiersman is a product of a lifelong fascination with Daniel Boone. A lawyer living in Connecticut, Brown is the son of a Kentuckian and a descendant of some of the Commonwealth's most prominent early settlers. Brown has immersed himself in the available primary sources, mastered the details of life in the late eighteenth-century Ohio Valley, and constructed a highly readable and reliable account of Boone's long and remarkable career. That career, the subject of several recent biographies, is well known. Born in Pennsylvania in 1734, Daniel Boone was a creature of the colonial backcountry. An expert hunter and scout, he was with General Edward Braddock's troops on their ill-fated march to the forks of the Ohio in 1755. By the 1770s, he had moved his family to what is now central Kentucky. There he became a prominent leader of the American settlers at Boonesborough. Brown recounts Boone's adventures, including his capture by Shawnees and his defense of the station named after him. In the 1780s, Boone attempted to follow the popular path to fortune in Kentucky—land speculation. But he was by temperament ill-suited for that shady...

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