Resurrecting the First Great American Play: Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit by Sämi Ludwig (review)

In Resurrecting the First Great American Play, Sämi Ludwig sets out to demonstrate that Robert Rogers's 1766 frontier melodrama Ponteach: or, The Savages of America, generally treated by scholars as a middling work of only antiquarian value in the history of the early American drama, is not only of significant "ideological interest" but also the equal of "the best stage entertainment in English at that time" (4). To substantiate these claims, Ludwig offers to "analyze the cultural work" of Ponteach "in a historical context, mainly by means of honestly positioning myself with my limitations as an author of the twenty-first century while at the same time trying to understand the complex and distant reality of the eighteenth century" (5–6). Ludwig's passion for Rogers's work is palpable, and his humility laudable. At the same time, certain scholarly oversights and problematic assumptions weaken his case for the play's historical (and particularly intercultural) significance.

The book is divided into two sections. The first outlines the life stories of Pontiac and Rogers, as well as the historical backdrop of the play; the second examines the literary qualities and significance of Rogers's work. The biographical material of the first section is generally engaging, though the first two chapters are needlessly padded with catalogs of every nonfictional and fictional representation of the two men's lives the author could find—from historical accounts to novelizations to children's books to films to toy soldiers (23–29, 57–63). Though interesting enough from a bibliophile's point of view, it's not clear how this information is helpful or germane to those seeking a new understanding of Rogers's play.

More problematically from a theoretical standpoint, Ludwig tends to trust without question his historical sources' depictions of Native American peoples, as when he writes that Howard Peckham's Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (1947) is "a gold mine of cultural and historical information on the great chief's upbringing" (19). Given how little we know about Pontiac's life—not to mention Peckham's proclivity for referring to Pontiac and his people as "savages"—I find myself questioning the value of the gold in this particular mine, whether for historical or literary analysis. This is a problem with many books about Indigenous persons and people: relying almost entirely on Euro-American sources, they are all too quick to make sweeping pronouncements about what Indians said, did, believed, desired, and were.

Given Ludwig's claims about the intercultural significance of Rogers's play, one might have expected him to make a sustained effort to avoid or, at least, to theorize this problem. Invoking Bakhtinian dialogism in his introduction (10), Ludwig contends that the "disharmonies in [Rogers's] play" (10) derive not from the playwright's inexperience but from "the situation of the very territory that our story describes. The Northwest was a contested area of extreme social and cultural hybridity, where traditions were constantly being negotiated and reinvented" (65). As his authority for this claim, Ludwig puts forward Richard White's influential The Middle Ground (1991), which he relies on extensively in his third chapter. But while White's thesis offers an enduring framework for understanding eighteenth-century Indian-European relationships, Ludwig's use of this framework is at once inadequately grounded in existing scholarship and, likely as a consequence, inconsistent in its conceptualization of the "middle ground."

In order to situate Ponteach in a space of "cultural hybridity," Ludwig argues that the play constitutes a reliable archive of "ethnographic information" (120) about eighteenth-century Indigenous lifeways as they came into conflict with their European counterparts. Yet this argument is based on the scantiest of evidence, consisting entirely of a few references in Rogers's play to such things as Indian gift-giving (120), oratory (121), scalping (122), and ransoming of hostages (123). One is left to wonder...