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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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Northwestern University history professor Merrell (The Indians of the New World) delivers a stunningly original and exceedingly well-written account of diplomacy on the edge of the Pennsylvania wilderness in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Readers of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales will remember characters like the Deerslayer?whites who lived on the edge of civilization, who adopted many ways of the Native Americans and thus were able to build bridges and negotiate peace across vast rivers of cultural difference. Merrell gives us portraits of the real-life Deerslayers. He also profiles their Delaware and Iroquois counterparts and shows how these early de facto diplomats were indispensable in constructing the "long peace" that reigned between Native Americans and colonists on the Pennsylvania frontier from the early 1680s through 1750. Merrell is at his best, though, when he shreds the myth?promulgated in Cooper's fiction and more recently in Kevin Costner's film Dances with Wolves?of the white wilderness men as advocates for Native Americans. As Merrell shows, these pioneers never lost their European prejudices. For them, getting along with the Delawares and Iroquois was only "a necessary step on the road to a brighter future, a time when those Indians would follow the forest into oblivion." Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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