Liquor and the Ethnic Cleansing of North America

Chapter 10 continues the focus on Native American temperance by highlighting the tension between US government goodwill and fair trade with native tribes on the one hand, and predatory capitalists—including John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company—who used liquor to subjugate the tribes on the other. William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) became an important mediator in this conflict between native pleas for prohibition and white profits. The role of distancing from predatory white liquor traders gives new perspectives on the Trail of Tears in the South, while the role of disputes over illegal white liquor peddling initiated the Black Hawk War to the North. As native tribes both north and south were relocated to the unsettled lands west of the Missouri and Arkansas territories, they found unscrupulous liquor dealers—including American Fur—waiting to take their tribal annuities in exchange for addictive liquor.

Do Accidental Wars Happen? Evidence from America's Indian Wars

The question of whether war can ever truly be accidental has been the subject of much academic debate. To provide my own answer to this question, I use an oft-ignored part of US history—the so-called Indian Wars between Native nations and an expanding United States. Specifically, this research innovation makes use of three militarized conflicts of the nineteenth century—the Black Hawk War (1832), the Cayuse War (1847–1855), and the Hualapai War (1865–1870)—to provide evidence that war can indeed occur accidentally. I conclude that IR scholars should be less confident in asserting that accidental war does not happen and that this possibility counsels restraint for policy-makers, especially in emerging domains of conflict.

1777–1840: The Big Knives Will Be in Control

This chapter recounts that while the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe were migrating into Illinois, the American colonists in the eastern reaches of North America were fighting for their national independence from the British. The war ended in 1783 with the victorious Americans founding a new nation. Four years later, the US government organized a swath of land that included parts of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan into what is known as the Northwest Territory. Located within the boundary of this new jurisdiction was Starved Rock, which officially became part of the Northwest Territory in 1787. In 1823, the first Americans settled in the Starved Rock area. The chapter then looks at the Black Hawk War in 1832. The conflict began as a Sauk Indian response to American settlers moving onto lands ceded in 1804. Ultimately, treaties and land cession agreements written by representatives of the US government were intended to swindle the tribes; they denied basic due process rights to the Indians.