“Odious” Abolitionists and “Insolent” Runaways

In the 1840s and 1850s, local slaveholders, runaway slaves, and Shawnees and their missionaries attached different meanings to the border between the territory of the Shawnees and the state of Missouri, between Indian Country and the United States. The inhabitants’s complicated and contradictory understandings of this borderland helped construct their identities, and the meanings they ascribed to the border resonated beyond their specific locality. A closer focus on this thirty-mile-long border exposes its meaning for people on each side and for those who crossed it. The line also had broader significance because national politicians intended it to differentiate U.S. and Indian territories. The border separated the Shawnee and Missouri settlers, and politicians believed it would prevent interactions in the area. However, other border residents had their own ideas and did what they could to make the boundary more permeable. The line mattered, but it resonated in unexpected and telling ways because of what people tried to do with and along it.

“Skilful Jockies” and “Good Sadlers”

This chapter introduces and assesses the roles horses played in the economies and societies of eighteenth-century southeastern Indians. Villagers throughout the region found horses essential in hunting, trade, and war. If the future of borderlands history centers partly on issues of spatial mobility and ambiguities of power, then horses are especially relevant to borderlands scholarship. In the early South, horses facilitated cross-cultural and economic exchanges while undermining the structures of authority for both Indians and whites. A closer look at the interrelationship between Indians, horses, and the environment affords new insights into borderlands history by underscoring how human and animal mobility not only complicated territorial boundaries and cross-cultural interactions but also subtly modified the socioeconomic foundations and ecological landscape of southeastern Indians.

Los Desaparecidos in the Gulf Coast and Early Texas Borderlands

This chapter highlights the experiences of those who disappeared or went missing on the southwestern borderlands in early Texas. Examined from the human angle of loss, the stories in the early Spanish narratives highlight the intense magnitude of destruction on these emergent borderlands, matching the dramatic numbers. A fresh look from this perspective also helps to insert Cabeza de Vaca’s account where it belongs—in the middle—as a connected series of entries into La Florida, some of which pushed west into Texas. Not just a miraculous “survivor,” the Spanish conquistador engaged in violent acts that mimicked previous conquistas; he also provided a model for others to follow as disappearances came to mark the borderlands for Spaniards and Indians alike. It also reminds readers that the possibility—even likelihood—of disappearance loomed over all of the colonial enterprise.

The Politics of Coalition Building in the Ohio Valley, 1765–1774

This chapter explores diplomacy in the Ohio Valley at the end of the colonial era to understand the motives that led colonial and Native leaders to cooperate and form coalitions. Such a study shifts scholars’s understanding of politics in the interwar Ohio Valley. It encourages a focus not on broad categories, such as militant and accommodationist Indians or pro-government and anti-government colonists, but rather on the messy web of political interests and affiliations that such categories often obscure. A diversity of concerns and strategies created the need for coalitions that bridged geographic, political, ideological, ethnic, and racial divisions. Lacking either an effective formal political system or a broad consensus regarding ends and means, Ohio Valley inhabitants could achieve their goals only by cultivating allies with dissimilar interests and priorities. The process of coalition formation therefore centered on the search for allies with overlapping interests, the articulation of those interests in ways that encouraged cooperation, and ongoing attempts to downplay or finesse coalition partners’s differing goals. These activities constituted the core of political life in revolutionary Ohio.

Borderlands Redemption

This chapter examines the range of approaches that Protestant missionaries took to their work in Ohio. In particular, it shows how Presbyterian Joseph Badger brought redemption to Ohio. Beginning in 1800, he made several journeys to proselytize in the region. Aggressively confronting the inhabitants of this “unbroken wilderness,” Badger made Ohio his own spiritual and physical frontier, a place to be transformed by the religion and culture he would impose. His approach contrasted with most immigrants to Ohio who dismissed Indians as pagans, strangers, and enemies, objects to be transformed or removed. Badger, however, detoured from the path many other Protestant proselytizers followed by sometimes befriending Native American neighbors and defending them against the onslaught of other American settlers. His efforts preserved a remnant of Ohio before it became a frontier for missionaries and settlers. Badger sustained the past compromises that had made Ohio a “middle ground,” a place where negotiations among various Europeans and Indians trumped the purposes of any one party. Badger’s competitors ran roughshod over his designs and efforts as they charged into Ohio and trampled any hope of preserving compromise.

French Missionary Priests and Borderlands Catholicism in the Diocese of Bardstown during the Early Nineteenth Century

An examination of the experiences of French missionary priests in the trans-Appalachian West adds a new layer of understanding to places ordinarily associated with the evangelical Protestant revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Their experiences of material deprivation, physical hardship, spiritual suffering, and lay opposition to ecclesiastical authority prompted some of them to reconsider what it meant to be a Catholic missionary in the early American republic, a context quite different from the one they envisioned. Many had difficulties relating their premigratory expectations of the missionary priesthood to their actual experiences of life within a borderlands diocese constructed by church officials in Rome thousands of miles away from the local populations, regional histories, and geographic obstacles that the foreign clergy would come to know intimately over the course of the early nineteenth century. As church leaders in the United States and Rome gradually broke up the Diocese of Bardstown during the antebellum period, French missionary priests realized that their dreams of establishing a nationwide institutional church and saving the peoples of an entire continent always clashed with the goals of other interest groups in the backwoods of Kentucky.

Red, Black, and Seminole

This chapter explores the relationship between African Americans and Seminole Indians in the context of the slow ethnogenesis of the Seminoles on the Florida borderlands. In this context, a fluid and historically contingent understanding of the relationship emerges, one where Seminoles and Africans followed converging and coalescing paths. Rather than treating Africans as occupying fixed categories—slaves, free, runaways, intermarried, descendents, or Seminoles—this interpretation recognizes both the temporal component to all these terms and the diversity of experiences within both the Seminole and African communities. Runaways married and had children; independent communities formed social, economic, and political alliances; and emancipation freed many Seminoles. Trade, marriage, sustained communication, and political needs gradually connected the autonomous villages of the Florida interior, while other Africans remained relatively unconnected to their Seminole neighbors.

Introduction

This introductory chapter lays out the major historiographic trends that have culminated in the current literature on American borderlands. It explores how Herbert Bolton used the term as a euphemism for the Southern frontier and how a series of scholars have overturned and challenged his presumptions. These include scholars of the West, Native America, Chicano/a studies, and they have pushed borderlands scholarship in new geographic and chronological directions. The introductory chapter further explores the collective and individual intellectual contributions of the volume’s essays.

“The Mark Unmistakably Fixed upon Their Brows”

This chapter explores the tangled web of the Clamorgans, a free black family in antebellum St. Louis. The Clamorgans, who were connected by kinship to many prominent families, reveal how race was carefully cultivated in a borderlands town. The Clamorgans did more that live in a borderlands locale. In particular, this essay explores how the Clamorgans explored the fluidity of racial and social categories in St. Louis to pursue their self-interest. By astutely manipulating their situation, the Clamorgans could move backward and forward across boundaries of every kind to protect themselves and exploit situations to their advantage.