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Reviews
| Fellow Travelers: Indians and Europeans Contesting the Early American Trail. By Philip Levy. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. xii + 199 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth).
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Rather than focusing on a specific Native group, European settlement, geographical region, or even time period, Philip Levy's Fellow Travelers traces the paths, people, and experiences that connected all of them. For Levy, "the trail" describes occasions when Native people and Europeans traveled together but was more broadly a "contentious arena of colonization" characterized by the "continuing intersection of European need and Native ability" (p. 2). Since Europeans needed Native knowledge of landscapes, languages, plants, animals, and people to get from place to place safely, and as Indians wanted the items Europeans offered in return, both sides had an interest in sustaining communication and interaction. |
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Levy's notion of "the trail" owes much to Richard White's well-known formulation of the "middle ground," although Levy's reference to specific "travel relationships" (p. 14) resists the tendency in some writing on Native-European encounters to find "middle grounds" everywhere (pp. 5, 148–49, n.9). At times, however, Levy's "trail" threatens to swallow the whole landscape. White's "middle ground" was chronologically as well as geographically bounded, whereas Levy's "trail" is substantially the same, whether located in sixteenth-century Florida, seventeenth-century Virginia or Iroquoia, the eighteenth-century Arctic, or the nineteenth-century travels of Lewis and Clark. Although "the trail was not a single transhistorical place," Levy argues that the relationships and conditions that characterized it were "typified more by continuity than change" over this long period (p. 5). |
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Fellow Travelers begins with the entradas of de Soto and Narváez, whose plans to extract valuable items and information from Native people by force were ultimately defeated by Native efforts to conceal, deceive, delay, and mislead. According to Levy, all subsequent European travelers learned from their mistakes and developed strategies of negotiation and a search for common ground. In certain cases, however, "travel practice" required maintaining cultural difference rather than negotiating a "shared culture of travel" (pp. 67, 68). A rattlesnake, for example, presented conflicting epistemologies between Native and "scientific" in addition to the practical problems posed by a venomous snake on the trail. The gendered forms of labor that made up the "trail" also presented a gulf difficult to bridge, as the overwhelmingly male travelers and writers tried to efface their reliance on Native women for anything more than food, sex, and cleaning. |
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The voyages of Alexander Mackenzie and Lewis and Clark serve as a coda to the book. These men were able to draw on a supply of European or métis translators, guides, and interpreters and inscribe a very different set of relationships on the map of North America, one not shaped by Native strategies and negotiation. |
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A book like this raises obvious questions. Levy includes Spanish, French, Dutch, British, and American travel accounts, although all are printed sources available in English. The Native men and women who often play the central role in Levy's narrative are from an even broader cultural sweep. Casting such a wide net raises the question of whether the "trail" really was a unique physical and metaphorical space largely independent of culture and chronology, one whose negotiated and contested nature survived into the nineteenth century, or whether it was more tightly determined by specific historical and cultural contexts. Surely a military expedition during the Seven Years' War would take on a very different shape than a Black Robe's journey deep into the pays d'en haut or a search for the South Sea. Many readers will no doubt find Levy's approach disconnected from more familiar concerns of law, warfare, and religion. Despite its limitations, however, Fellow Travelers presents a persuasive case that encounters were tense, contested occasions and that these features endured far longer than other approaches might suggest.
Michael A. LaCombe
Adelphi University
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