Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

Ritual Ground: Bent's Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest. By Douglas C. Comer. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xiv, 321 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-520-20429-8. Paper, $16.95, isbn 0-520-20774-2.)

From 1833 to 1849, Bent's Old Fort, the turreted "Castle of the Plains" on the Arkansas River in present-day Colorado, dominated commerce and knit together diverse, fragmented groups of traders, Native Americans, entrepreneurs, Hispanics, métis, and trappers. The fort's "rituals of trade" served to avert intertribal and interracial violence and played a strategic role in the "winning of New Mexico and the Southwest" for the United States. After 1849, when the fort's network of ritual exchange broke down, ending both the fictive (ceremonial) and the actual kinship (marital) ties between Anglos and Native Americans, each group increasingly saw the other as "inhuman," and a cycle of violence, massacre, and betrayal ensued. 1

Douglas C. Comer's intriguing case for the ritual dimensions and effects of trading requires more historical details about ceremonial practices, such as the central calumet ceremony where trading partners "smoked over" the goods. The "displays of exquisite etiquette" accompanying all trading are scantily recorded. Comer is a United States National Park Service archaeologist who excavated Bent's Old Fort in the mid-1970s, but aside from connecting class hierarchy to ceramics and earthenware discovered at the site, he rarely offers material culture as evidence to support his theoretical claims. . . .

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