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

In some ways, Thundersticks does nothing new. David J. Silverman recounts histories well-known to Native American and early American historians: The Six Nations' expansionist mourning wars, King Philip's War, the Native American slave trade of the colonial Southeast, the Seven Years' War and Pontiac's War, Nuu-chah-nulth ascendancy in the Pacific Northwest, the Seminole War, and the rise of the Comanche and Blackfeet on the Great Plains. Much of this territory has been well-covered by a variety of scholars. What Silverman does, beautifully and to profound effect, is examine these histories from a new angle, centring the role of access to and command of firearms played in Native warfare and diplomacy, both between Native societies and in Native relations with colonial powers. By focusing on the trade in firearms and ammunition that developed after European arrival in North America, Silverman argues convincingly that firearms transformed Native North America and the course of early American history. Far from being overawed by European firearms, Native North Americans eagerly adopted the smoothbore, muzzle-loading, flintlock musket as a weapon of war, tool of subsistence, item of trade, and marker of status.

The book is structured roughly chronologically, beginning with the Iroquois gaining first access to Dutch firearms at Fort Orange in the 1630s and using this unequal access to dominate the Huron and their many Algonquian-speaking rivals throughout the Great Lakes region. Sparking what Silverman refers to as an "Indian arms race" that ultimately decimated the region, the Iroquois scaled down their mourning wars by the turn of the eighteenth century. Silverman convincingly demonstrates how a "gun frontier" advanced into each region of North America, as more Native societies adopted firearms and became buyers, sellers, and middlemen in a trade that eventually introduced firearms into every corner of the continent. Silverman necessarily focuses much of his study on the trade in firearms (and conflict over that trade) between Native societies and the British colonies, as Britain conducted the bulk of this trade in the colonial era. New France's inability to consistently supply the quality and quantity Native customers demanded, and New Spain's restrictions on trade in firearms with Native people meant that British-supplied guns made their way into the hands of even non-allied or enemy Native societies as colonial governments struggled to restrict this trade in justified fear of those very guns being used against colonists. For example, in the late seventeenth century, South Carolina's lords proprietor failed repeatedly to enforce laws against enslaving Native poeple within 400 miles of Carolina because prominent Carolina colonists found trading firearms for Native slaves too lucrative. When the Yamassees, Tuscaroras, Creeks, and others went to war against the English in the 1710s, Native military strength, made possible by trade with Carolina, terrified the Carolina colonists. The book effectively closes with the Indian wars of the nineteenth-century American West and the confinement of the Blackfeet to reservations in Montana and Alberta after they followed the familiar pattern of using firearms to dominate their Native enemies. Once their enemies also acquired firearms, by the 1870s the Blackfeet found, like so many Native societies across North America before them, the loss of life in these battles left them unable to resist white encroachment.

I have only two complaints about an otherwise excellent book. First, the opening chapter does not do justice to the cultural complexity represented in the later chapters. Silverman discusses, in very general terms, "Indian" or "Native" beliefs about the supernatural power of firearms. He cites the conflict between Thunderbird and Horned Underwater Serpent as an example of how Native cosmology shaped Native peoples' relationship with guns, without indicating to which Native societies Thunderbird and Horned Underwater Serpent mattered. This is especially striking in contrast to the body chapters, each of which addresses in great detail the specific political, economic, and cultural contexts in which specific...