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  • Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America by David J. Silverman
  • Matthew Jennings (bio)
Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America. By David J. Silverman. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 371. $29.95 cloth)

Seminole war leader Osceola put it succinctly in the words he allegedly aimed at General Duncan Clinch in 1835: "You have guns and so have we—you have powder and lead, and so have we" (p. 208). In Thundersticks, David Silverman tackles a large, dimly understood aspect of Native American history—how Native people acquired, understood, and employed guns—and has produced a work of lasting value. There is no question that the arrival of horses, largely via [End Page 248] the Spanish to the south, and guns, largely via the English and the United States to the east, wrought earth-shaking transformations across a huge swath of Native North America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. In fact, many textbooks feature a map with a thicket of arrows (no small irony there) to help drive home this point. Most previous accounts stress European and American control of the trade in firearms, and downplay Native power. Silverman has produced an important new narrative that demonstrates how the diffusion of firearms through Native America took shape, traces the myriad of ways in which Native people directed the flow of weapons into their homelands, and chronicles the debilitating and empowering effects of the gun for indigenous communities.

After an introduction featuring the surrender of the Lakotas, and their guns, to the United States in the late nineteenth century, Silverman arranges Thundersticks along chronological and regional lines. The earliest chapters treat the dawn of the arms trade among the Mohawks, in New England, and in the Southeast, and the shock-waves that reverberated through eastern North America as a result. Subsequent chapters address the role of firearms in the Seven Years' War and its aftermath, the role of guns in the sea otter fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, Seminole resistance, Plains middlemen, and the case of the Blackfeet, whose ascendance in the mid-nineteenth century owed much to their ability to limit gunrunners' access to their rivals. A brief epilogue considers the symbolism of the rifle as employed by activists of the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee in the 1970s.

Obviously, any work that purports to include all of Native America, as the book's subtitle suggests, will sacrifice depth of coverage at times. Some of the chapters, such as the one on the Seven Years' War, dig more deeply into archival or primary source material than others. But when Silverman relies more heavily on published work, he chooses wisely from some of the best that recent Native American historical scholarship has to offer. Silverman also might have afforded more analysis to the varied Native cultural responses to the spread of [End Page 249] guns. The handful of instances in which he approached this subject were tantalizing.

Perhaps the most important contribution that Thundersticks makes is in its deft reframing of a plethora of historical processes, including settler colonialism and indigenous responses to it, through the lens of firearms. There is more work to be done on this significant subject. Silverman's excellent history has reopened a crucial area of inquiry, and it is not difficult to imagine future dissertations exploring the implications of his ideas in area-specific studies. Thundersticks deserves wide readership, and it is likely to become a staple in graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate courses in Native American history.

Matthew Jennings

MATTHEW JENNINGS teaches history at Middle Georgia State University in Macon. He is author of New Worlds of Violence (2011) and the editor of The Flower Hunter and the People (2014), and is currently researching several topics related to the Native Southeast and local history in middle Georgia.

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