Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American ... and the University of North Carolina Press)

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest recovers the agrarian village world Indian women created in the lush lands of the Ohio Valley. Algonquian-speaking Indians living in a crescent of towns along the Wabash tributary of the Ohio were able to evade and survive the Iroquois onslaught of the seventeenth century, to absorb French traders and Indigenous refugees, to export peltry, and to harvest riparian, wetland, and terrestrial resources of every description and breathtaking richness. These prosperous Native communities frustrated French and British imperial designs, controlled the Ohio Valley, and confederated when faced with the challenge of American invasion. By the late eighteenth century, Montreal silversmiths were sending their best work to Wabash Indian villages, Ohio Indian women were setting the fashions for Indigenous clothing, and European visitors were marveling at the sturdy homes and generous hospitality of trading entrepots such as Miamitown. Confederacy, agrarian abundance, and nascent urbanity were, however, both too much and not enough. Kentucky settlers and American leaders—like George Washington and Henry Knox—coveted Indian lands and targeted the Indian women who worked them. Americans took women and children hostage to coerce male warriors to come to the treaty table to cede their homelands. Appalachian squatters, aspiring land barons, and ambitious generals invaded this settled agrarian world, burned crops, looted towns, and erased evidence of Ohio Indian achievement. This book restores the Ohio River valley as Native space. Examines the Ohio River valley though an environmental lens and explores the role that American Indian women played in creating a sedentary agrarian village world in this rich and fertile landscape. Focuses on the crescent of Indian communities located along the banks of the Wabash River valley, a major Ohio tributary, to trace the evolution of the agrarian-trading nexus that shaped village life. The agricultural work of Indian women and their involvement in an Indian-controlled fur trade provides a glimpse into a flourishing village world that has escaped historical attention and refutes the notion that this region was continually torn asunder by warfare. Trade and diplomacy allowed Indians to successfully control the Ohio River valley until the late eighteenth century, with neither the French nor the British exercising hegemony over these lands. Instead, Indians incorporated numerous Europeans and vast numbers of Indian refugees into their highly diverse world, enabling different Algonquian-speaking Indians to live adjacent to and with each other, eventually paving the way for the Pan-Indian Confederacies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Indian world that Americans encountered in the 1780s was an Indian-controlled landscape that they had long defended from repeated foreign intrusions, not the middle ground of fragmented Native groups associated with imperial contact. Until the crushing defeat at Fallen Timbers in 1794, Indians believed that Americans were another wave of intruders that could be repulsed. "What frustrated Washington was his ongoing failure to induce Indians north of the Ohio to cede their lands ... Washington had sought to pacify the Indians by abandoning the doctrine of discovery and reimbursing them for their lands. But they continued to refuse to come to the treaty table, condemned further land cessions north of the Ohio, and formed the first northwestern Indian confederacy to oppose intrusion on their homelands ... Washington had to find other means to undercut Indian resistance. Those means involved razing villages, destroying the crops, and taking hostage the women and children the warriors were trying to protect ... Washington ordered the Kentucky militia to cut a wide swath of terror though agrarian communities clustered along the Wabash. Those villages, primarily populated by women, served as the breadbasket for Indian forces. Washington believed that the destruction of these communities and the kidnapping of their women and children would force those warriors to return to their villages and abandon their resistance to Washington's forces. He had done it successfully to the Seneca during the Revolutionary War, and he planned to do it again"--Introduction.