| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

*American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State*. By Stephen Aron. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. xxi + 301 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $29.95.)
The first and lasting impression a reader will have after finishing this book is that the author is a superb writer and thinker. Aron's metaphors, taken from nature, serve as brilliant organizing tools for the enormous task at hand: describing and explaining this Missouri frontier's transition from being the site of overlapping imperial regimes in Indian country to being a new state on the fault line of national division over slavery. This is western history at its best, an endlessly absorbing drama of national, even global, importance, playing itself out in the actions of ordinary men and women.	1
In any work of synthesis, the author must rely to some degree on secondary sources. Aron is no exception, and his analysis, especially in the first half of the book, is somewhat limited by the uneven coverage various topics have received. Following the fine work of scholars such as Willard Rollings, Fred Fausz, and others on the Osages, Aron weaves the patterns of this group's history into the main narrative and nicely captures the complexity of their experience in this turbulent period. Throughout the book, Indian groups, whether native to the area or more recent arrivals, receive an appropriate amount of attention and agency. Aron also resists what he deems "neo-Parkmanism" and treats the various imperial regimes that play a role in Missouri as anything but "immutable." On the contrary, "[t]he history of the confluence region ... demonstrates how the practices of colonialism were the products of intercultural negotiations" (p. xix).	. . .

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