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114 The Michigan Historical Review Burns. It was a treat to revisit many happy memories of a childhood spent in that church that were awakened upon my reading the entry (pp. 180-89). All in all, Detroit’s Historic Places of Worship is a fine addition to the literature of ecclesiastical architecture. Robert A. Faleer Central Michigan University Kim Crawford. The Daring Trader: Jacob Smith in the Michigan Territory, 1802-1825. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. Pp. 305. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Paper, $29.95. Historians such as James Merrell have described the perilous life of the go-between, or intermediary. These are the individuals who stitched together competing colonizers and Native communities on the borderlands of the Americas. In The Daring Trader, a biography of Jacob Smith, we have another example of a person who lived between American Indian and colonial worlds. Smith was born in Québec, Canada, to German parents. But he spent the majority of his life in Detroit, as well as along the Flint River, where he made a living as a trader, interpreter, and spy on behalf of the United States government. His main patron was Lewis Cass, the second territorial governor of Michigan and a brigadier general during the War of 1812. Smith was fluent in multiple languages and became a vital player in American expansion, even though his friends and enemies suspected him of treason and the pursuit of personal aggrandizement throughout his career. Kim Crawford uses court records, land deeds, treaty minutes, and scattered references to bring Jacob Smith, one of the least-wellknown figures in Michigan’s early history, to life. Smith spent most of his adulthood in Detroit, a town founded by French traders, usurped by the British during the Seven Years’ War, and subsequently battled over by British and American troops during the War of 1812. Settlers and territorial governors alike were suspicious of Smith, and, by extension, most Detroiters. Federally appointed governors, including William Henry Harrison, and those who later joined militias from Kentucky and Ohio, did not trust traders who lived and worked on the border between colonizers and Indians. The realities of their lives, such as the fact that Smith had both a non-Indian and an American-Indian wife, unsettled them. We know very little about his wife and child among the Saginaw Chippewa, except that marrying into Book Reviews 115 Indian villages was essential to the success of trading ventures. Settlers who came to southeastern Michigan after the war wanted to maintain clear boundaries between themselves and the American Indians who remained on their land. Smith’s peculiar history, and his varied allegiances, encouraged their suspicions. Eventually, even the Chippewa came to dislike him because he helped negotiate treaties that opened most of the Flint River region, his former trading territory, to settlement. Smith ultimately defrauded the Saginaw Chippewa of some of their land when he inserted the names of his non-Indian children into their treaties, thereby making them beneficiaries of treaty land. The Daring Trader is a good book about an individual who must have been exceedingly difficult to research. However, additional context surrounding Smith’s life and work among the Saginaw Chippewa would have improved this biography. At times Crawford falls into the trap of defining Smith as a loyal American citizen. The reality, as the vast literature on go-betweens suggests, is that men such as Smith were often at odds with both colonizers and the American Indians on whom they depended. Smith’s experience, like so many others, suggests that he was a man whose life, and career, hinged on managing the fault line between these increasingly divergent communities. Stephen Warren Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois Dave Dempsey and Jack Dempsey. Ink Trails: Michigan’s Famous and Forgotten Authors. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. Pp. 183. Bibliography. Notes. Photographs. Paper, $19.95. In their wide-ranging and well-researched discussion of 19 Michigan authors, brothers Dave and Jack Dempsey have done a great service to the state’s important literary heritage. Their definition of a Michigan author is generously vague. It includes not only those born in the state, but also individuals who came...

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