Finalist for the 2023 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize
"Immersive and humane." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries.
Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American fur traders who spent months in smoky winter lodges or at boisterous summer rendezvous. These families built cosmopolitan trade centers from Michilimackinac on the Great Lakes to Bellevue on the Missouri River, Bent’s Fort in the southern Plains, and Fort Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest. Their family names are often imprinted on the landscape, but their voices have long been muted in our histories. Anne F. Hyde’s pathbreaking history restores them in full.
Vividly combining the panoramic and the particular, Born of Lakes and Plains follows five mixed-descent families whose lives intertwined major events: imperial battles over the fur trade; the first extensions of American authority west of the Appalachians; the ravages of imported disease; the violence of Indian removal; encroaching American settlement; and, following the Civil War, the disasters of Indian war, reservations policy, and allotment. During the pivotal nineteenth century, mixed-descent people who had once occupied a middle ground became a racial problem drawing hostility from all sides. Their identities were challenged by the pseudo-science of blood quantum—the instrument of allotment policy—and their traditions by the Indian schools established to erase Native ways. As Anne F. Hyde shows, they navigated the hard choices they faced as they had for centuries: by relying on the rich resources of family and kin. Here is an indelible western history with a new human face.
Anne F. Hyde, a historian of the American West, is the author of Empires, Nations, and Families, winner of the Bancroft Prize and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is professor of history at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma.
Table of Contents
Maps ix
A Note on Terms xi
Preface xiii
Prologue Seasons of Marriage and War 1
1 Ozhaguscoday wayquay and John Johnston: Mixing Blood in the Fur Trade, 1670-1790 21
2 Wintering Families and Corporate War, 1770-4810 44
3 Fur Trade Migrants: Pacific McKays and Canadian Johnstons, 1800-1820 64
4 "This Kind of Business Will Make Trouble Remaking the Fur Trade, 1810-1830 90
5 From the Sault to Oregon Country: Mingling Blood and Land, 1818-1838 117
6 Forging Peace on the Southern Plains, 1821-1840 146
7 Rivers of Trouble in Indian Country, 1831-1843 170
8 "Marked for Slaughter": Borderland Violence in the 1840s 197
9 Surviving War and Peace in the 1850s 223
10 Civil Wars in the West, 1860-1865 252
11 Reconstructing Race on Western Reservations, 1866-1885 277
12 "A Mighty Pulverizing Engine": Allotment Policy and Blood Quantum, 1880-1907 303
