Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 by Susan Sleeper-Smith (review)

Scholarship on the Great Lakes region continues to tug the field of early American history westward. Susan Sleeper-Smith’s pioneering research on the fur trade and American Indian women has proved to be an influential pull factor in the field. Her new book builds on her expertise with impressive interdisciplinary research, evocative writing, and ambitious sweep. Its title and introduction lead readers to expect a study of one segment of the Native population in one region of the Old Northwest. But the book moves far beyond its stated scope. Men and women, Indians and European Americans, agriculture and material culture, diplomacy and warfare all receive rich treatment, from the southern shores of Lake Erie, west to the Wabash River, to the trade entrepôts of Green Bay and Michilimackinac far to the north.

Sleeper-Smith contends that at the time of its conquest by an imperialistic United States in the Northwest Indian Wars of the 1780s and 1790s, the Ohio River Valley was “a prosperous Indian world” made possible by the economic, political, and cultural contributions of indigenous women (p. 12). Though scholars have since failed to recognize this prosperity and the role of women in achieving it, President George Washington and the U.S. Army grasped both. Their military strategy against the Northwestern Indian confederacy reflected that cognizance.

The first five chapters of the book reconstruct what the author sees as “a kind of paradise” that flourished along the tributaries of the Ohio River in the century before its despoliation at the hands of “terrorizing and plundering” Americans (pp. 5, 11). Readers encounter this prelapsarian world in vividly rendered scenes of peace and plenty. A “horticultural lushness” characterized Huron and Miami settlements, whose prolific fruit orchards and vegetable gardens yielded “almost unlimited food resources” (pp. 63, 6). The Green Bay of the late seventeenth century that attracted Wea and Kickapoo migrants was not a refuge for shattered escapees of Iroquois expansion, as previous scholars have portrayed, but a community “drawn together by trade and exchange” (p. 69). Indians engaged in the Ohio Country fur trade were “well dressed, lived in substantial houses, and experienced unprecedented prosperity” (p. 162). No Hobbesian state of nature was this.

The final three chapters turn grim as they tell of a paradise lost beginning with American independence. George Rogers Clark tomahawked and scalped a path of destruction to Vincennes during the American Revolution, his ragtag band of Kentucky militiamen killing and plundering “well-dressed and well-supplied Indians” (p. 213). General Arthur St. Clair executed orders from President Washington to kidnap Indian women and children and imprison them at Fort Washington near Cincinnati in 1791. The losses experienced by families such as that of Miami peace chief Kaweahatta only inflamed Native resistance to the United States. Little Turtle’s defeat by General Anthony Wayne at the battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 represented the tragedy’s nadir.

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 is intended as a corrective to a perceived pre-dominance of nationalistic and whitewashed histories of American expansion. “Scholars and raconteurs have downplayed the aggression associated with settler colonialism because of an intransigent belief that Indian victims were murderous, backward, and doomed,” Sleeper-Smith states in the conclusion (pp. 319–20). Her book endeavors to help us “appreciate the world that was lost” to American imperialism and value it as “a viable alternative” (pp. 5, 12).

The Great Lakes region indeed retains a place on the map of early America, if perhaps at its periphery. So, too, do some of the field’s ideological battles waged by scholars a generation ago.