Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Peter H. Wood, Duke University

Ideas for important books occur in the darnedest places. English historian Edward Gibbon sat among the ancient ruins of the Capitol in Rome when he conceived his tome on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. American scholar Perry Miller perched amid oil drums beside the Congo River, at Matadi in central Africa, when he felt the calling to explore the early American experience, beginning with the Puritan errand into the wilderness. For Daniel K. Richter, the epiphany came during a visit to St. Louis. The director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania found himself staying high up in a hotel that overlooked the Mississippi River. From his room, he could see Eero Saarinen's majestic Gateway Arch rising overhead in the foreground. "I gazed through it," Richter recounts, "facing east, toward the country that early nineteenth-century folks who lit out for the territories thought they had left behind" (p. 1).	1
This introductory sentence, with its invocation of Mark Twain's Huck Finn, suggests the focus of Richter's book. Using the Mississippi as a western boundary, he concentrates on a steadily shifting and decreasing region beyond the early Atlantic colonies that European newcomers often referred to vaguely as Indian Country. It announces his perspective—facing east—and it hints at the importance of his subject. For the racial politics that evolved in this busy sphere during the three centuries after 1500 did much to shape later American culture. In the nineteenth century, thousands of folks who, like Huck Finn, "lit out for the territories" farther west carried with them the burdens of that eastern inheritance, whether they realized it or not. And in the twentieth century, when historians avoided or distorted this portion of early American history, their work marginalized a part of the North American experience that has considerable explanatory power for anyone addressing the intriguing puzzles of the early American past.	2
Facing East provides a timely synthesis of recent work rather than a comprehensive survey text. Richter's highly readable overview is filled with suggestive details, personal insights, and well-chosen quotations. Reading his initial discussion of Cahokia, I found myself wondering how different our perspective on early American history would be if someone had convinced John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to forgo the reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg and invest in the careful restoration of that considerably older, larger, and more American town instead. After a brief prologue about this pre-Columbian settlement (part of which was destroyed in the creation of St. Louis and East St. Louis, Illinois), Richter devotes chapter 1 to a Native American perspective on the sixteenth-century intrusion of Jacques Cartier into Canada and Hernando de Soto's invasion of the Southeast. Three subsequent sections concentrate on the formative seventeenth century.	. . .