Book Review

Canada and the United States

"Cultural cleansing" (p. 176) is the term Elizabeth A. Perkins chooses to describe the work of some historians of the trans-Appalachian West. Too often, she writes, these historians have produced "triumphal and patriotic narratives" and "shaped their accounts along increasingly racist and nationalistic lines" (pp. 175, 173). She aims to remedy this situation by viewing the late eighteenth-century Ohio Valley backcountry "not from the perspective of distant elites, but instead up close . . . through the eyes of common settlers as they reflected upon their own experiences" (p. 2). To accomplish this, she combines a deep reading of primary sources with poststructuralist literary theory and the ethnographic methods of Clifford Geertz.

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This book is based on three hundred oral interviews of surviving Revolutionary Ohio Valley pioneers (mainly Kentuckians), collected and transcribed by nineteenth-century historian John Dabney Shane. The Shane transcriptions are now housed in the Draper Collection of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, where Perkins has obviously labored long and hard. Perkins begins with a chapter overview of the Shane sources, stressing the paradoxical, "ambivalent and conflicting perceptions of his pioneer informants" (p. 175). She then organizes her study into successive chapters focusing on environment, Indian-pioneer interaction, ethnic and cultural diversity, and the socio-economics of frontier politics and power. A final chapter focuses on "memory" and the ways in which Perkins believes informants (and historians) "construct" their recollections of the past.

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