William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest
William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest

Author: William Heath

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2015-03-11

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 080615148X

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Born to Anglo-American parents on the Appalachian frontier, captured by the Miami Indians at the age of thirteen, and adopted into the tribe, William Wells (1770–1812) moved between two cultures all his life but was comfortable in neither. Vilified by some historians for his divided loyalties, he remains relatively unknown even though he is worthy of comparison with such famous frontiersmen as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. William Heath’s thoroughly researched book is the first biography of this man-in-the-middle. A servant of empire with deep sympathies for the people his country sought to dispossess, Wells married Chief Little Turtle’s daughter and distinguished himself as a Miami warrior, as an American spy, and as an Indian agent whose multilingual skills made him a valuable interpreter. Heath examines pioneer life in the Ohio Valley from both white and Indian perspectives, yielding rich insights into Wells’s career as well as broader events on the post-revolutionary American frontier, where Anglo-Americans pushing westward competed with the Indian nations of the Old Northwest for control of territory. Wells’s unusual career, Heath emphasizes, earned him a great deal of ill will. Because he warned the U.S. government against Tecumseh’s confederacy and the Tenskwatawa’s “religiously mad” followers, he was hated by those who supported the Shawnee leaders. Because he came to question treaties he had helped bring about, and cautioned the Indians about their harmful effects, he was distrusted by Americans. Wells is a complicated hero, and his conflicted position reflects the decline of coexistence and cooperation between two cultures.

John Howard Payne Papers, 3-Volume Set
John Howard Payne Papers, 3-Volume Set

Author: Rowena McClinton

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022-11

Total Pages: 1184

ISBN-13: 1496232992

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This collection of John Howard Payne's Papers is a significant recovery of firsthand political and social histories of Indigenous cultures, particularly the Cherokees, a southeastern tribe, whose ancestral lands included parts of the present-day states of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The papers enable readers to understand how the Cherokees and many other American Indians endured and persevered as they encountered forced removal in the 1830s due to the Indian Removal Act. The papers are also a source of cultural revitalization, elucidating the work of Sequoyah, a Cherokee genius, who in 1821 introduced his syllabary, a phonemic system with eighty-five symbols. John Howard Payne (1791-1852), an American actor, poet, and playwright, was so taken by the Cherokees' story that he lobbied Congress to forgo their removal and wrote articles in contemporary newspapers supporting Cherokees. In 1835 Payne journeyed to the Cherokee Nation and met with John Ross, Cherokee chief from 1828 to 1866, who found in Payne a colleague to assist him and other Cherokees with their cause against removal and in preserving their ancient social, spiritual, and political heritages. Payne gathered and recorded correspondence between Cherokees such as Ross, who was fluent in English, and U.S. officials. These papers include multiple correspondences, ratified and unratified treaties, contemporary newspaper articles, and resolutions sent to Congress appealing for justice for the Cherokees. Payne also assembled letters and writings by New England Congregationalist missionaries who resided in mission stations throughout the Cherokee Nation. Available in print for the first time, this remarkable repository of information provides a fuller understanding of the political climates Cherokees encountered throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century.

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest
Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest

Author: Susan Sleeper-Smith

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-05-11

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1469640597

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Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest recovers the agrarian village world Indian women created in the lush lands of the Ohio Valley. Algonquian-speaking Indians living in a crescent of towns along the Wabash tributary of the Ohio were able to evade and survive the Iroquois onslaught of the seventeenth century, to absorb French traders and Indigenous refugees, to export peltry, and to harvest riparian, wetland, and terrestrial resources of every description and breathtaking richness. These prosperous Native communities frustrated French and British imperial designs, controlled the Ohio Valley, and confederated when faced with the challenge of American invasion. By the late eighteenth century, Montreal silversmiths were sending their best work to Wabash Indian villages, Ohio Indian women were setting the fashions for Indigenous clothing, and European visitors were marveling at the sturdy homes and generous hospitality of trading entrepots such as Miamitown. Confederacy, agrarian abundance, and nascent urbanity were, however, both too much and not enough. Kentucky settlers and American leaders—like George Washington and Henry Knox—coveted Indian lands and targeted the Indian women who worked them. Americans took women and children hostage to coerce male warriors to come to the treaty table to cede their homelands. Appalachian squatters, aspiring land barons, and ambitious generals invaded this settled agrarian world, burned crops, looted towns, and erased evidence of Ohio Indian achievement. This book restores the Ohio River valley as Native space.

Autumn of the Black Snake
Autumn of the Black Snake

Author: William Hogeland

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2017-05-16

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0374711585

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William Hogeland's Autumn of the Black Snake presents forgotten story of how the U.S. Army was created to fight a crucial Indian war. When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, the newly independent United States savored its victory and hoped for a great future. And yet the republic soon found itself losing an escalating military conflict on its borderlands. In 1791, years of skirmishes, raids, and quagmire climaxed in the grisly defeat of American militiamen by a brilliantly organized confederation of Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware Indians. With nearly one thousand U.S. casualties, this was the worst defeat the nation would ever suffer at native hands. Americans were shocked, perhaps none more so than their commander in chief, George Washington, who saw in the debacle an urgent lesson: the United States needed an army. Autumn of the Black Snake tells the overlooked story of how Washington achieved his aim. In evocative and absorbing prose, William Hogeland conjures up the woodland battles and the hardball politics that formed the Legion of the United States, our first true standing army. His memorable portraits of leaders on both sides—from the daring war chiefs Blue Jacket and Little Turtle to the doomed commander Richard Butler and a steely, even ruthless Washington—drive a tale of horrific violence, brilliant strategizing, stupendous blunders, and valorous deeds. This sweeping account, at once exciting and dark, builds to a crescendo as Washington and Alexander Hamilton, at enormous risk, outmaneuver Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other skeptics of standing armies—and Washington appoints the seemingly disreputable Anthony Wayne, known as Mad Anthony, to lead the legion. Wayne marches into the forests of the Old Northwest, where the very Indians he is charged with defeating will bestow on him, with grudging admiration, a new name: the Black Snake. Autumn of the Black Snake is a dramatic work of military and political history, told in a colorful, sometimes startling blow-by-blow narrative. It is also an original interpretation of how greed, honor, political beliefs, and vivid personalities converged on the killing fields of the Ohio valley, where the United States Army would win its first victory, and in so doing destroy the coalition of Indians who came closer than any, before or since, to halting the nation’s westward expansion.

Tecumseh and the Prophet
Tecumseh and the Prophet

Author: Peter Cozzens

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0525434887

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"An insightful, unflinching portrayal of the remarkable siblings who came closer to altering the course of American history than any other Indian leaders."⁠ —H.W. Brands, author of The Zealot and the Emancipator The first biography of the great Shawnee leader to make clear that his misunderstood younger brother, Tenskwatawa, was an equal partner in the last great pan-Indian alliance against the United States. Until the Americans killed Tecumseh in 1813, he and his brother Tenskwatawa were the co-architects of the broadest pan-Indian confederation in United States history. In previous accounts of Tecumseh's life, Tenskwatawa has been dismissed as a talentless charlatan and a drunk. But award-winning historian Peter Cozzens now shows us that while Tecumseh was a brilliant diplomat and war leader--admired by the same white Americans he opposed--it was Tenskwatawa, called the "Shawnee Prophet," who created a vital doctrine of religious and cultural revitalization that unified the disparate tribes of the Old Northwest. Detailed research of Native American society and customs provides a window into a world often erased from history books and reveals how both men came to power in different but no less important ways. Cozzens brings us to the forefront of the chaos and violence that characterized the young American Republic, when settlers spilled across the Appalachians to bloody effect in their haste to exploit lands won from the British in the War of Independence, disregarding their rightful Indian owners. Tecumseh and the Prophet presents the untold story of the Shawnee brothers who retaliated against this threat--the two most significant siblings in Native American history, who, Cozzens helps us understand, should be writ large in the annals of America.

‘Indian Wars’ and the Struggle for Eastern North America, 1763–1842
‘Indian Wars’ and the Struggle for Eastern North America, 1763–1842

Author: Robert M. Owens

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1000219615

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‘Indian Wars’ and the Struggle for Eastern North America, 1763–1842 examines the contest between Native Americans and Anglo-Americans for control of the lands east of the Mississippi River, through the lens of native attempts to form pan-Indian unions, and Anglo-Americans’ attempts to thwart them. The story begins in the wake of the Seven Years’ War and ends with the period of Indian Removal and the conclusion of the Second Seminole War in 1842. Anglo-Americans had feared multi-tribal coalitions since the 1670s and would continue to do so into the early nineteenth century, long after there was a credible threat, due to the fear of slave rebels joining the Indians. By focusing on the military and diplomatic history of the topic, the work allows for a broad understanding of American Indians and frontier history, serving as a gateway to the study of Native American history. This concise and accessible text will appeal to a broad intersection of students in ethnic studies, history, and anthropology.

The Chiefs Now in This City
The Chiefs Now in This City

Author: Colin Calloway

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0197547656

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America's founding involved and required the melding of cultures and communities, a redefinition of 'frontier' and boundaries in every possible sense. Using the accounts of Native leaders who visited cities in the Early Republic, Calloway's book reorients the story of that founding. Violent resistance was just one of many Native responses to colonialism. Peaceful interaction was far more the norm, and while less dramatic and therefore less covered, far more important in its effects.

The Good Country
The Good Country

Author: Jon K. Lauck

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2022-11-21

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0806191414

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At the center of American history is a hole—a gap where some scholars’ indifference or disdain has too long stood in for the true story of the American Midwest. A first-ever chronicle of the Midwest’s formative century, The Good Country restores this American heartland to its central place in the nation’s history. Jon K. Lauck, the premier historian of the region, puts midwestern “squares” center stage—an unorthodox approach that leads to surprising conclusions. The American Midwest, in Lauck’s cogent account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the nineteenth century. The Good Country describes a rich civic culture that prized education, literature, libraries, and the arts; developed a stable social order grounded in Victorian norms, republican virtue, and Christian teachings; and generally put democratic ideals into practice to a greater extent than any nation to date. The outbreak of the Civil War and the fight against the slaveholding South only deepened the Midwest’s dedication to advancing a democratic culture and solidified its regional identity. The “good country” was, of course, not the “perfect country,” and Lauck devotes a chapter to the question of race in the Midwest, finding early examples of overt racism but also discovering a steady march toward racial progress. He also finds many instances of modest reforms enacted through the democratic process and designed to address particular social problems, as well as significant advances for women, who were active in civic affairs and took advantage of the Midwest’s openness to women in higher education. Lauck reaches his conclusions through a measured analysis that weighs historical achievements and injustices, rejects the acrimonious tones of the culture wars, and seeks a new historical discourse grounded in fair readings of the American past. In a trying time of contested politics and culture, his book locates a middle ground, fittingly, in the center of the country.

Muddy Ground
Muddy Ground

Author: John William Nelson

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2023-09-12

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1469675218

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In early North America, carrying watercraft—usually canoes—and supplies across paths connecting one body of water to another was essential in the establishment of both Indigenous and European mobility in the continent's interior. The Chicago portage, a network of overland canoe routes that connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, grew into a crossroads of interaction as Indigenous and European people vied for its control during early contact and colonization. John William Nelson charts the many peoples that traversed and sought power along Chicago's portage paths from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, including Indigenous Illinois traders, French explorers, Jesuit missionaries, Meskwaki warriors, British officers, Anishinaabe headmen, and American settlers. Nelson compellingly demonstrates that even deep within the interior, power relations fluctuated based on the control of waterways and local environmental knowledge. Pushing beyond political and cultural explanations for Indigenous-European relations in the borderlands of North America, Nelson places environmental and geographic realities at the center of the history of Indigenous Chicago, offering a new explanation for how the United States gained control of the North American interior through a two-pronged subjugation of both the landscapes and peoples of the continent.

The Indian World of George Washington
The Indian World of George Washington

Author: Colin G. Calloway

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-03-09

Total Pages: 648

ISBN-13: 0190652179

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George Washington's place in the foundations of the Republic remains unrivalled. His life story--from his beginnings as a surveyor and farmer, to colonial soldier in the Virginia Regiment, leader of the Patriot cause, commander of the Continental Army, and finally first president of the United States--reflects the narrative of the nation he guided into existence. There is, rightfully, no more chronicled figure. Yet American history has largely forgotten what Washington himself knew clearly: that the new Republic's fate depended less on grand rhetoric of independence and self-governance and more on land--Indian land. Colin G. Calloway's biography of the greatest founding father reveals in full the relationship between Washington and the Native leaders he dealt with intimately across the decades: Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Guyasuta, Attakullakulla, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Cornplanter, Red Jacket, and Little Turtle, among many others. Using the prism of Washington's life to bring focus to these figures and the tribes they represented--the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware--Calloway reveals how central their role truly was in Washington's, and therefore the nation's, foundational narrative. Calloway gives the First Americans their due, revealing the full extent and complexity of the relationships between the man who rose to become the nation's most powerful figure and those whose power and dominion declined in almost equal degree during his lifetime. His book invites us to look at America's origins in a new light. The Indian World of George Washington is a brilliant portrait of both the most revered man in American history and those whose story during the tumultuous century in which the country was formed has, until now, been only partially told.