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 entrepots 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.