Into the American Woods
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| Author(s) | James H. Merrell |
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| Subtitle | Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier |
| Publisher | W.W. Norton & Company |
| Honors | |
| An award-winning historian’s beautifully written reconstruction of how Europeans lived in peace and war with Indians on the early American frontier. We know them from Conrad, Greene, and Le Carre, as spies, diplomats, renegades, and traders. They’ve been with us since the mythic past, when Hermes carried messages from the gods to the Greeks, and when Deganawidah with his disciple Hiawatha built the Great League of Peace among the Iroquois. They are the go-betweens, the shadowy figures who move between us and them, linking different worlds. On the Pennsylvania… | |
An award-winning historian’s beautifully written reconstruction of how Europeans lived in peace and war with Indians on the early American frontier. We know them from Conrad, Greene, and Le Carre, as spies, diplomats, renegades, and traders. They’ve been with us since the mythic past, when Hermes carried messages from the gods to the Greeks, and when Deganawidah with his disciple Hiawatha built the Great League of Peace among the Iroquois. They are the go-betweens, the shadowy figures who move between us and them, linking different worlds. On the Pennsylvania frontier they were Germans and Irish, Delawares and Iroquois, with names like Weiser, Croghan, Shickellamy, and Osternados. These were the “wood’s men,” at home in the woods, knowledgeable in the ways of the other, able to negotiate the thickets of cultural misunderstanding and mistrust. From the Quaker colony’s founding in the early 1680s into the mid-1750s, they did the hard, dirty work that helped maintain the fragile “long peace” between Indians and colonists. But skilled as they were they could not prevent the colony’s sickening plummet from peace to war after 1750. The harsh lesson of the woods was the final incompatibility of colonial and native dreams about the continent they shared.
Honors
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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
