Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America by David J. Silverman (review)

David Silverman's history of the indigenous encounter with firearms spans the continent, ranging from the seventeenth-century Iroquois Wars to the nineteenth-century otter trade in the Pacific Northwest. Silverman deploys the concept of the "gun frontier," a multipolar zone of contact at the intersection of the international arms trade and indigenous markets. The gun frontier, he argues, encouraged Indians to adapt their political economies to the opportunities offered by this new technology. In a pattern that repeated itself across the continent, Indians used guns to harvest resources such as beaver pelts and bison robes that could be converted into more guns. Indians cultivated diplomatic relationships with Europeans to ensure a steady flow of munitions and used their arsenals to sever indigenous rivals from guns, resources, and European allies. The gun frontier thus fostered market-fueled violence that devastated some peoples while propelling others to unprecedented heights.

Readers of this journal will be most interested in a pair of chapters on the rise and fall of equestrian gunmen in the Plains. Osages in the central Mississippi valley used firepower purchased from French arms traffickers to prevent western Indians from accessing French markets, and French traders from traveling west. Silverman argues that weaker nations, such as the Wichitas, reinvented themselves as "middlemen," buying arms from alternative markets in Louisiana and selling them to western neighbors like the Comanches. The Wichitas thereby cultivated more powerful protectors while also fueling the Comanches' meteoric rise. Yet the shifting gun frontier made it precarious to be a middleman. The nineteenth-century advance of Americans into Texas gave the Comanches new arms markets and rendered the Wichitas superfluous.

Silverman shows that Indian nations were seldom content to be middlemen, and sought to consolidate their grip on the gun frontier whenever possible. The Blackfeet of the northern Plains first accessed the gun markets of the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) via Cree "middlemen" in the 1730s, using advanced military hardware to repel the equestrian Shoshone. Guns propelled Blackfeet expansion, leading to violent clashes with the Crees as Blackfeet established direct links with the HBC and other trading companies. By the early nineteenth century, the centerpiece of Blackfeet foreign policy was "an arms blockade of Indians in the Rockies" (264). Yet with firearms came ecological collapse from overhunting and demographic decline from epidemic disease.

The concept of the gun frontier helps resolve the seeming paradox that indigenous peoples like the Blackfeet and Comanche were expanding at the same moment they slid into decline. Indigenous peoples were encouraged to embrace the penetration of capitalist markets, not least in the buying and selling of firearms. Those firearms, encompassing the destructive forces of colonialism, fueled the efflorescence of Native power at the same time they wrought their downfall.