Book Review

Canada and the United States

James E. Davis. Frontier Illinois. (A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1998. Pp. xx, 515. $35.00.

These books are the third and fourth to appear in the Indiana University Press "History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier" series, edited by Walter Nugent and Malcolm Rohrbough. Although Mark Wyman and James E. Davis share similar goals, the series editors have given them plenty of leeway to pursue and develop their individual ideas. As a result, the books employ rather different approaches and avoid presenting materials that vary only by place. Yet, at the same time, they address fundamental issues related to the occupation and settlement of neighboring states during the nineteenth century. Unlike some of the New Western historians who are unable or unwilling to use the term "frontier," Wyman and Davis have moved beyond such intellectual blinders to address the issues related to that slippery term,	1
Of the two books, Davis's volume gets the reader to the 1770s after a mere fifty pages. The author identifies three broad factors or groups that molded society in frontier Illinois. These were the physical environment, the people who lived there, and outsiders whose actions had some economic, social, or political impact on the society. Davis posits a situation in which tension and conflict among these three elements produced the frontier society. Although that argument is supported by his evidence, Davis avoids giving a specific definition of the frontier. Rather, he presents a two-sided definition. First, it is a physical region that moved generally from the Ohio Valley in the south to the Lake Michigan shore at Chicago in the northeast and to Galena and the lead mining region near the Mississippi in the northwest. Within this shifting area, Davis presents a small society in which people lived in relative isolation, experienced considerable loneliness, encountered acute labor shortages, faced inadequate credit, and dealt with nearly overwhelming transportation difficulties, Second, in addition to being a specific but moving place, the Illinois frontier represented the process of settlement and development of the economy, society, and political structures in the state. The narrative traces the evolution of technology from hand tools to the railroads and the telegraph. While the economy developed rapidly, the society matured slowly: from simple to complex, and from isolation to becoming almost entirely integrated into the national political and economic systems.	2
Clearly, an era stretching from the 1770s through 1860 presented Davis with some difficulties. When part of the state was participating in national developments, other parts had few people and lagged decades behind. Thus one has frontier conditions even when the state population had moved above the million person mark. To deal with that, the narrative combines chronological discussions with more narrowly focused topical chapters. Davis's central thesis is that frontier Illinois developed within a broadly accepted consensus that saw most people seeking to avoid disorder and violence. Although he admits that those things occurred at the personal level—with frequent drinking bouts and fist fights offering a kind of public entertainment—he assures the reader repeatedly that once the arguments had been dealt with, the foes shook hands and went on about their lives.	3
Overall, Davis presents a clear picture of developments in early Illinois. At the same time he has a tendency to give too much information in support of his ideas. For example, when discussing the formation of new counties and disputes among towns over which one would become the county seat, Davis cites so many examples that he is likely to lose all but the most careful reader in the process. This tendency to provide unneeded data lengthened the book unnecessarily by at least a hundred pages. Usually his argument that frontier conditions created powerful drives for social cohesion is persuasive. At the same time, his presentation of frontier Illinois as a society lacking significant social conflict and violence is at least questionable. The narrative includes much evidence of such actions from the organization of farmers and miners' claim associations to violence over abolition and other vigilante actions.	. . .