Muddy Ground

“An excellent environmental history of early America. By recalling the wetlands and oak savannahs that lined the southern shores of Lake Michigan, Nelson enables us to see the region through the eyes of the people who, for millenia, came to the portage to trade, hunt, fish, and gather. Muddy Ground also reminds us of the scale and impact of the United States asserting its sovereignty over the land, defying nature itself by draining wetlands and destroying their ecological abundance.”—Journal of American History

“Nelson has impressively excavated French- and English-language sources for glimpses of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chicago. Combining those materials with Native oral histories, archaeological studies, and trade records, he convincingly demonstrates the portage’s centrality to movement, commerce, colonialism, and resistance.”—American Historical Review

“Nelson provides an insightful perspective on the spatial transformation of the Chicago Portage as a gateway to the North American interior. . . . Muddy Ground leads the push for future studies of Native geography, diplomacy, and intercommunal relations in the dynamic spaces that connect coastal and interior waters.”—Ethnohistory

“Tightly argued . . . Muddy Ground is an excellent book. By focusing attention on portages, it suggests novel ways of conceptualizing how Native people accumulated and exercised power from the ground up.”—Environmental History

“[Muddy Ground] provide[s] critical insights into the processes and impacts of altered physical, economic, and racial landscapes. . . . [Nelson] effectively connects the narrative strands of internal improvements with Indigenous dispossession. . . . The argument is sound, accessible, and persuasive. . . . [This study is] worth your time.”—Indiana Magazine of History

“This groundbreaking study brings to light the importance of Indigenous space at a crossroads of the Great Lakes and the Great Plains.”—Western Writers of America’s Roundup Magazine

“Carefully argued and elegantly organized. . . . Nelson’s sharp analysis of the connection between internal improvements and northern Indian removal is a tremendous offering to scholars of American Indian history, the early republic, environmental history, and beyond.”—Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society

“Muddy Ground is a brilliant synthesis of Indigenous and environmental history, illuminating the importance of Chicago as a crossroads linking the Great Lakes and the Great Plains. Nelson provides a compelling narrative showing how first Indigenous people, and subsequently the American settler state, mastered space and mobility in order to make this muddy space a gateway to the west.”—Michael J. Witgen, author of Pulitzer Prize–finalist Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America

“This amazing new book reconsiders Chicago as an early American place. Framing Chicago as the continent’s most important portage, Nelson recenters early American history around the swamps and wetlands of the future metropolis, exploring important currents in Indigenous history, borderlands history, environmental history, and the history of colonialism.”—Robert Morrissey, author of People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America

“This book helps to shift the paradigm in how we understand the long history of Indigenous space, its conquest in the nineteenth century, and the ramifications ever since.”—Kathleen DuVal, author of Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution