| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 1825–1855. By William E. Unrau. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xiv, 201 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1511-7.)

William E. Unrau, distinguished professor of history emeritus at Wichita State University, provides convincing evidence for his argument, "That the establishment of Indian country in 1834 was ineffectual and a failure from the beginning should come as no surprise" (p. 148). In the first book-length study of "Indian Country," the author explains why government efforts to establish a safe haven for Native Americans failed to insulate them from an alien culture or protect them from land-hungry Americans. Nineteenth-century letters, documents, and other accounts leave little doubt that many Americans had more interest in acquiring Indian country than in fulfilling promises made to tribes in persuading them to surrender their ancestral homelands. While Unrau documents the obvious, his evidence provides insight into the pressure exerted on politicians and bureaucrats charged with the enforcement of treaties that blocked white acquisition of arable land. The book spans thirty years from the negotiation of the 1825 Kansa and Osage land cession treaties by the Saint Louis Indian superintendent William Clark to the enactment of Illinois senator Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which precipitated an invasion of Indian country the government condoned, if not encouraged.

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