| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Battle for the Soul: Métis Children Encounter Evangelical Protestants at Mackinaw Mission, 1823–1837. By Keith R. Widder. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999. xxiv, 254 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-87013-491-4.)

The subtitle of Battle for the Soul is something of a misnomer; only the last of the work's five chapters focuses on the encounter between Métis children and evangelical Protestants at Mackinaw Mission. Keith R. Widder's real purpose is to pick up the story of the fur trade society in the western Great Lakes where accounts by such scholars as Richard White and Jacqueline Peterson leave off—from the establishment of U.S. political and military supremacy in the region in 1815. Neither the fur trade nor the multicultural social relations brokered by Métis on which it rested ended with the War of 1812. Instead, Widder demonstrates, American ascendancy in the western Great Lakes reinforced the social order of the fur trade in ways that ultimately undermined it. Battle for the Soul is about the complex, sadly ironic consequences of Americanization, to use Widder's term, for those Peterson has called "a people in between." The book's title is apt. . . .

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