Indigenous and Imperial Histories Entangled in the Upper Mississippi Valley

In Iowa City late in the spring of 1910, Frederick Jackson Turner, then president of the American Historical Association, was presenting a paper at the third annual meeting of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, a young organization founded by historians wanting to wrench American history from the firm grip of their profession’s eastern establishment. By then one of the nation’s most influential public intellectuals, Turner could not resist offering his audience a bold set of reasons why the Mississippi Valley, above all other regions at that moment, was significant in American history. Historians who turned their attention to the Mississippi Valley, he declared, would be exploring “the section potentially most influential in the future of America” and learning about “the most vital activities of the whole nation.” Whether examining “movement of population, diplomacy, politics, economic development, or social structure,” they would discover “fundamental problems in shaping the nation.”¹

Of course, those “vital activities” and “fundamental problems,” which Turner went on to delineate in his essay, had everything to do with the imagined destiny of the United States. “From the beginning,” he preached to the choir, “it was clear that the lands beyond the Alleghanies furnished an opportunity and an incentive to develop American society on independent and unconventional lines.” In perhaps overly radiant language, Turner did acknowledge that “the significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history was first shown in the fact that it opened to various nations visions of power in the New World—visions that sweep across the horizon of historical possibility like the luminous but unsubstantial aurora of a comet’s train, portentous and fleeting.” That vast region’s Indigenous peoples, however, were relegated by the Harvard professor to “the Stone Age, hinted at in legends and languages, dimly told in the records of mounds and artifacts, but waiting still for complete interpretation.” France, he went on to claim, simply “wrote a romantic page in our early history, a page that tells of unfulfilled empire.” And Spain, in his view, reluctantly accepted the region from France only “as a means of preventing the infringement of her colonial monopoly in Spanish America rather than as a field for imperial expansion.” It took members of the English empire, as Turner predictably concluded, to realize “the importance of the Mississippi Valley as the field for expansion.”²

Frederick Jackson Turner’s urgent plea to study the Mississippi Valley would be heeded by more and more historians during the twentieth century, and in recent decades we have been busily capturing the region’s significance in ways that far surpass what he could have foreseen and perhaps would have desired. Published in 1991, Richard White’s prize-winning Middle Ground scrutinized Indian-colonial relations across the Great Lakes more closely than ever and produced a concept of “creative misunderstanding” that influenced historical inquiry in every other region of North America. Susan Sleeper-Smith and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, meanwhile, reinforced our knowledge of how intercultural negotiation, exchange, and conflict intricately shaped the lives of Indigenous inhabitants inside western Great Lakes communities.³ Works by Carl Ekberg, Jay Gitlin, Patricia Cleary, and Catherine Cangany discovered degrees of dynamism and levels of rootedness in the region’s French colonial society that Turnerian history had also dismissed.⁴ Back in 1910, Turner confined his consideration of enslaved people in the region strictly to the question of how U.S. expansion into the Mississippi Valley had shoved the “slavery issue” to the precarious forefront of American politics. But thanks to important studies by Brett Rushforth and Tiya Miles a century later, the deeper and longer history of how Indigenous captives were exchanged and enslaved in the region is now better understood, adding the midcontinent to what historians have finally realized about the scale and extent of Indigenous slavery across the Atlantic World.⁵

This expanding early American history of the Mississippi...