How to Tell a Story about Indians and Empire

In his essay “How to Tell a Story” (1895), Mark Twain wrote that “there are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous.” According to Twain, this uniquely American form of story is different from “the comic story,” which is English, and the “witty story,” which is French. Whereas the humorous story depends upon “the manner of the telling,” comic and witty stories depend upon “the matter.” The first is “strictly a work of art—high and delicate art—and only an artist can tell it,” but “no art is necessary” to tell the other two—“anybody can do it.” In The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America, Joshua Piker offers his own insights into how to tell an American story, often with a dash of humor. Like Twain, he is interested in the way a story is told, its effects on listeners, and the aims its teller might have in telling it. Indeed, he notes that Twain is his “favorite storyteller” and cites his address “On the Decay of the Art of Lying” (1882) to distinguish stories from lies—both of which are abundant in the tales Piker covers (p. 12). As a writer, Piker enjoys puns, alliteration, repetition, and colloquialism; and he punctuates his narrative with punchy phrasing, rhetorical questions, and author’s asides. His book is about powerful stories, and he wants to tell one of his own, too.

Piker has many stories to tell. At the core of the book are four sets of stories from the mid–eighteenth century about a single individual, Acorn Whistler, who is first introduced to the reader as “a head warrior from the Creek town of Little Okfuskee” (p. 4). Piker admits that these accounts “would not seem, at face value, to be worth the price of admission.” Their subject is simply too obscure—“Acorn Whistler’s death is not a particularly important topic.” Yet he argues that the “imperial, national, local, and colonial” subtexts for these stories were very important (pp. 26–27). These branching, spreading historical narratives about British imperialism, Creek nationalism, Native cultural understandings, and colonial insecurities are Piker’s true focus. By exploring the consequences of “a very specific event at a very particular place with a very limited cast of characters,” he aims to prove that “microhistories could have global implications” (pp. 11–12).

Piker also wants to highlight a third sort of narrative, “the historian’s tale,” which joins the first two (p. 27). The stories and their subtexts are not so separate after all, and, as a historian, Piker aims to identify those connections even as he teases them apart. Here Piker himself emerges as a narrator not so different from the humorous storyteller in Twain’s essay, someone “innocent and happy and pleased with himself” who works himself into “great animation” only then to “lose confidence” mid-story. Piker, for example, is not so sure his own story works. He writes that the “end result is odd—I sometimes describe this book as Rashomon meets Last of the Mohicans, with a dash of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—and at times untidy, but so was the colonial American world that I seek to illuminate.” Nor is he confident that the stories he relates are even true: “if there is truth to be found here, it is in the relationship between the stories, not in the stories themselves.” Even this true story-of-stories is indeterminate and uncertain. According to Piker, its central themes are the “ambiguity, negotiation, and conflict that characterized Acorn Whistler’s entangled and inescapably insecure world” (pp. 27–28).

In nearly all of these stories, and in Piker’s own story-of-stories, there is one certainty: Acorn Whistler “had to die”—a phrase that appears thirteen times (pp. 4, 12, 13, 15, 27, 66, 102, 106, 137, 138, 224, 228, 240). Piker reveals how this inevitability came to be by...