Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest

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376 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 32 halftones, 16 maps, 4 tables

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-4058-7
Published: June 2018
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5916-9
Published: February 2020
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-4059-4
Published: May 2018
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5268-7
Published: May 2018

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

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Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Awards & distinctions

Honorable Mention, 2019 Ray Allen Billington Prize, Organization of American Historians

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 entrepôts 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.

About the Author

Susan Sleeper-Smith is professor of history at Michigan State University. She has authored one previous book and edited four essay volumes.
For more information about Susan Sleeper-Smith, visit the Author Page.