Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest
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.