Book Review

James H. Merrell's masterly study of the "go-betweens" who managed relations between Native Americans and Pennsylvanians in the eighteenth century tells a depressing tale—and not just for the way in which it shows "how, after 1750, Penn's Woods became an abbatoir." For the story Merrell tells reveals not so much a downward trajectory from Holy Experiment to Paxton Boys as a diplomatic system that never really worked, of societies whose interests were so profoundly at odds that any real meeting of the minds was virtually impossible. Colonists such as Conrad Weiser and native leaders such as Shickellamy for their own self-interested reasons kept things patched together for a generation, but, in the end, "far from being part of the solution to stormy relations between native and newcomer," such go-betweens "turned out to be part of the problem." The problem was not, Merrell persuasively argues, because negotiators were inept or unable to understand the aims and world views of the people from another culture. Quite the opposite; by the 1750s the go-betweens had helped each side to understand the other all too well, and the resulting familiarity bred something far worse than contempt.

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