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Reviews of Books
Claudio Saunt, University of Georgia
| Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. By Ned Blackhawk. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 384 pages. $35.00 (cloth), $17.95 (paper).
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Though the Great Basin, that vast stretch of land lying between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, is terra incognita to most early American historians, Ned Blackhawk makes the convincing case that it deserves a place in our national narratives. Its early history illustrates an important point: colonists set in motion waves of violence that washed over distant regions long before they set foot there. The impoverished Shoshone and Paiute Indians so contemptuously described as "Diggers" by Americans in the mid-1800s were in fact shaped by colonialism a century earlier. Blackhawk traces colonial violence in the Great Basin from its origins in the early seventeenth century to the 1863 Bear River Massacre, when U.S. troops killed three hundred Shoshones in what is now southeastern Idaho. "It was not my intention to take any prisoners" (263), recounted Patrick Edward Conner, the U.S. officer commanding at Bear River. |
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Violence over the Land joins works by Juliana Barr, James F. Brooks, Colin G. Calloway, Kathleen DuVal, and Steven W. Hackel that explore the early history of lands west of the Mississippi River.1 Ethnohistorians and others have traversed those regions before, but few have engaged with early American historiography as directly as the current generation of scholars. Slavery, gender, and colonialism now concern historians working on both sides of the Mississippi, and the relatively unknown West is offering new perspectives on those subjects. As Blackhawk notes, the history of the Great Basin contains important lessons for early Americanists studying other regions. Its past illustrates that the "narrative of American history . . . has failed to gauge the violence that remade much of the continent before U.S. expansion" (1). |
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In the eighteenth century, much of the violence in the Great Basin came in the form of slaving, and Blackhawk explores its effect on the Utes, Paiutes, and Shoshones in detail. Whereas Brooks documented communities of captives and cousins in the Southwest borderlands, Blackhawk crosses the Colorado River to take a closer look at Ute slave raiders and the peoples they terrorized. "Different Ute bands as well as Navajos from south of the Colorado River initially withstood and then displaced the horrors of Spanish colonialism onto the peoples of the Great Basin," he explains, "and lightning slave raids and warfare came to characterize Indian relations throughout the region" (20). Much of that violence occurred beyond the purview of literate colonists and, unfortunately, it remains largely undocumented. At times Blackhawk makes his case rhetorically, as when he writes about "pandemic relations of violence" and "perpetual and seemingly apocalyptic violence" (26), but in the end his point is undeniable: many of the captives sold in New Mexican markets came from Southern Paiute and Western Shoshone bands, and those peoples must have been significantly affected, even if there are no extant accounts of their travails. They were especially vulnerable because they did not have horses; the divide between those with horses and those without frequently marked the line between captors and captives. |
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For Utes the slave trade became a profitable enterprise. By the mid-eighteenth century, they and the neighboring Comanches, who also engaged in the slave trade, were "at the zenith of their power" (52), bolstered by their frequent raids on nonequestrian peoples. On multiple occasions Blackhawk describes Indian-on-Indian violence as a form of displacement, in which Spanish colonists were the prime movers. But the term leads to imprecise formulations. "As Spain incorporated neighboring Indian peoples into alliances," writes Blackhawk, "these Native groups in turn further displaced the violence and slavery of Spanish colonialism onto more distant, less powerful peoples" (73–74). In what sense they displaced rather than participated in or even fostered the violence is not clear. The term deflects agency, even to the point of conflating Indians with Spanish colonists. "When exactly Paiute groups became enmeshed in the violence of Spanish colonialism is uncertain" (74), Blackhawk notes, though in this case Spanish colonialism came in the form of Ute raiders. "Displacement" does not convey the complexities inherent in Blackhawk's own narrative, which shows how the slave trade enriched some native groups while devastating others. |
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By the close of the eighteenth century, Paiutes and Shoshones were being pulled deeper into a colonial political economy that increased their vulnerability. In 1776 the Domínguez-Escalante expedition, with Ute assistance, circled through the Great Basin, producing a map that became a key instrument for future colonists. By the time Meriwether Lewis and William Clark explored the northern tributaries of the Snake River, the Shoshones they met were "besieged, dependent, and fearful" (157), pinned between armed and mounted Utes on one side and Crows, Assiniboins, and Piegans on the other. Paiute and Shoshone lands came under further pressure after Mexican independence. Mexico encouraged the expansion of trade and settlement and at the same time let the long-standing Spanish-Ute alliance lapse. In some respects the growing trade networks benefited equestrian Indians such as the Utes and Snake River Shoshones, who were well positioned to barter fur-bearing animals and horses to American traders. But their nonequestrian counterparts continued to suffer from the slave trade and from the environmental degradation caused by fur traders and their pack animals. After the U.S.-Mexican War, large numbers of colonists, including Mormons, flooded into the Great Basin, and Indian bands jockeyed for resources and power. Southern Paiutes even sought protection from Mormons, who themselves became the target of Ute raids after they interfered with the slave trade. The adaptations that Great Basin Indians made in the face of difficult and sometimes desperate circumstances are as much a part of Blackhawk's narrative as violence is. But because native peoples faced ever-diminishing resources, violent competition for those resources ultimately destroyed the fragile economic and political relationships they had formed with colonists. When President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a new birth of freedom in the East, his troops were massacring Indians in the West. That too should be part of our national narratives, Blackhawk suggests. |
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In an epilogue that is both more personal and more contemporary than the preceding chapters, Blackhawk asks, "Is there adequate space within the wellspring of American history to begin discussing the pain of America's indigenous peoples?" (293). More prosaically, we might wonder why early American history has stopped for so long at the Appalachians, all but ignoring as historical subjects (by my rough estimate) three out of every five people living in North America in 1700. Blackhawk's insightful and at times passionate exploration of the Great Basin offers a model for how narratives of American history—or the "epic of America" (293), as he writes—might be extended to incorporate peoples and places traditionally excluded. In Blackhawk's forceful account of its past, the Great Basin seems very much a part of colonial America, and the violence that swept over it appears every bit as important as political events that occurred along the East Coast to an understanding of the nation and its origins. |
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Notes
1 James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002); Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln, Neb., 2003); Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005); Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007).
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