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

Following the arrival of various English, French, Spanish, and Dutch interlopers in North America, Indian peoples up and down the Atlantic Coast quickly became enamored with the power of European firearms. However, as Indians lacked the technological capability to produce new guns at will—as well as the wherewithal to furnish their own powder or lead for European-made weapons—a one-sided dependency took root. Gradually, this reliance on European allies to provide the materials of war undermined Indian abilities to resist imperial subjugation. Thus, control of the gun supply made it all but inevitable that Europeans (and later Americans) would reign over the continent. Such is the overly simplistic, Anglo-centric, and somewhat fatalistic narrative relayed in untold college classrooms across the United States—and it's precisely the account that David Silverman works to dismantle in Thundersticks.

In Silverman's rendering of post-contact North America, colonialism is a two-way street. On one hand, Native people suffered the political, economic, and cultural consequences of European occupation. On the other, they derived genuine power from European technologies and habitually simmering imperial rivalries. As what Silverman calls the "gun frontier" spread, local and then regional arms races popped up throughout the continent and Indians did become dependent on European firearms. But as Silverman argues convincingly throughout the book, dependence on technology never equaled dependence on a single European state or empire.

Natives became masterful diplomats, playing one imperial power against another to create vast stockpiles of arms, powder, and lead. They adjusted their economic strategies to suit European markets, with the aim of acquiring more and more weapons. Options were the key to Indians successfully managing their dependency: when one supply line closed, others could be exploited. And as their military power grew, Indians were able to force their European business partners to comply with Native cultural mores related to gift-giving and signals of "friendship" (which generally all resulted in Europeans handing over free guns and massive supplies of powder and shot). When Europeans refused to abide these arrangements, Indians unleashed terrifying ambuscades on vulnerable towns and settlements to illustrate why it was ultimately more cost-effective for colonists to buy peace than achieve it through military force.

At the same time as they negotiated with Europeans, powerful gun-wielding Indians like the Iroquois worked to restrict the access of their Indigenous rivals to European weapons markets. In this way, Thundersticks not only chronicles the spread of the gun frontier from the perspective of Indians but illuminates how fire-arms reshaped the ways Indians interacted with each other. This was particularly the case in the Ohio Valley of the 1670s, where the Iroquois harnessed their new arsenal to take land, captives, and sovereignty away from Indians like the Miami and the Shawnee, who lacked sufficient firearms to resist.

According to Silverman, on the surface, England's pivotal victory in the Seven Years' War had drastic consequences for Indians; the expulsion of the French made it more difficult to play empires against each other on the stage of gun diplomacy. Even so, during Pontiac's Rebellion—a war waged largely to determine who would control the Ohio Territory—Indian warriors more than held their own against the English military, despite the absence of aid from the French government. The eventual defeat of Indians, Silverman concludes, had nothing to do with a paucity of arms and munitions; rather, Natives didn't believe they could win a sizeable enough victory without French boots on the ground and determined that a prolonged, indecisive conflict wasn't worth their blood or treasure.

Later chapters explore the Seminole insurgency against the American government and the rise of the Comanche and the Blackfeet in the Far West. Silverman's coverage of the former underscores the internationality of the Indian gun trade—Seminoles did business with Spanish Cuba and the British Bahamas even as the United States...