Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Colonial Pennsylvania - Hardcover

Merrell, James H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393046761 ISBN 13: 9780393046762

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1999

Synopsis

Focuses on the variety of people who acted as intermediaries to prevent war and win peace between colonial settlers and native Americans in the early 18th century. Merrell (history, Northwestern U.) emphasizes the risks they took trying to reconcile two very different cultures, their successes and failures, occasional dishonesty, and the contempt they often suffered from both sides. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

About this title

Review:

Although the American West was ultimately won by killing nearly every Indian who got in the way, the initial contacts between native and Euro-American cultures were for the most part peaceful, defined by the social and geopolitical norms set by the land's original inhabitants. Into the American Woods examines how semiprofessional negotiators defined a "middle ground" in frontier Pennsylvania where schisms between Anglos and native Americans were temporarily appeased for mutual economic and political gain.

English colonial administrators, seeking to purchase land, establish trade, and avert conflict, became dependent on opportunists at the colony's edge, such as German entrepreneur Conrad Weiser, or trader George Groghan, to negotiate with the Delaware, Shawnee, Iroquois, and other regional tribes and bands. Uninterested in learning the ways of new arrivals, the native peoples sent sons of mixed European and Indian heritage or Christian converts to negotiate on their behalf. By trading wampum, using sign language, and scribbling pictographs, these go-betweens developed ambiguously effective means of bridging cultural divides. Negotiators, however, did not fully trust each other's intentions and maintained the prejudices of their own cultures. The French-Indian Wars lessened the effectiveness of councils or other forms of negotiation and tensions between Anglo and Native American civilizations intensified, culminating in the infamous "Paxton Boys" massacre of 1763. Each stage of Merrell's lively, extremely well-researched analysis is filled with colorful "woods lore"--anecdotes often comic in nature, focusing on the rampant alcoholism and bawdiness of frontier life--which illustrate the personalities of key negotiators, as well as the strategies and conditions by which White and Native America conversed in the early 18th century, an era when the wampum belt carried more power on the frontier than the flintlock. --John Anderson

From Kirkus Reviews:

A pathbreaking scholarly work, by one of the nation's leading historians of the interaction between Native Americans and European newcomers in early America. In this deeply researched book, Bancroft Prizewinning historian Merrell (The Indians' New World, not reviewed) unearths the lives of the go-betweenstranslators, diplomats, traders, and otherswho for a time linked the disparate peoples of colonial America into a network of functioning relationships. This volume is also an extended essay on the meaning and significance of woodlands and wilderness to New World natives and colonists. With Pennsylvania as its focus, the book traces the lives and activities of people of whom many historians will never have heardof transcultural Indians (such as She kallamy) and colonists (such as Conrad Weiser) who had ``unmatched ability to negotiate the frontier's cultural terrain.'' That terrain was a forested borderland of language, trade, religion, settlement, and treaty-making. And its go-betweening inhabitant s, whom Merrell brilliantly brings to life, faced not just formidable obstacles of culture but the more tangible ones of food, travel, lodging, and safety as they tried to create comity between people of vastly different ways and thought. But cultural bor ders were never to be fully crossed, nor peace easily secured. Whatever these dedicated go-betweens might attempt, armed skirmishes, then war, eventually came to the colony by the 1760s, and no go-betweens could save the natives from the resulting disaste r. Never before has this generally well-known story been told this wayas a history of identity, acculturation, nature, and words. Anthropologists, ethnographers, even naturalists and linguists, as well as historians, will welcome and mine the book for yea rs. Written in language as robust as a monograph will allow, the book is a stunning achievement. (30 illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0393046761
• ISBN 13: 9780393046762
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448