Indian men and white women in Indiana and Michigan

Two wonderful articles combine genealogical and microhistorical chronicles with deep thoughts about race and intermarriage in the Midwest. They're just out in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, unfortunately available only if you have access to an amazing bookstore, or a library that subscribes to the journal itself or to Project Muse (hat tip to the Legal History blog):

"'They Found Her and Left Her an Indian': Gender, Race, and the Whitening of Young Bear," by Jim J. Buss, historian at Oklahoma City University (volume 29, issue 2&3, page 1). It was a famous story in the 1800s -- Frances Slocum, taken from her Pennsylvania home as a young girl in the 1780s, rediscovered by her brothers some sixty years later, having made a good life as an Indian wife and mother. The story was retold not just because of its inherent fascination, but because it called into question the racist ideas that justified clearing Indians from the Midwest. Buss reviews the retellings and shows how they often describe a mixed-race society in central Indiana in 1840 even though the authors wanted to deny the possibility of any such thing. He's working on a book to be titled The Winning of the West with Words: Clearing the Middle Ground for American Pioneers. Some of the 19th-century versions are recorded at this Rootsweb site -- but keep in mind that a characteristic vice of us genealogists is to take those stories as gospel truth.

"Miengun's Children: Tales from a Mixed-Race Family," by Susan E. Gray of Arizona State University (volume 29, issue 2&3, page 146). Regular readers will recognize her as author of The Yankee West. Working with some data provided by genealogists, she tells a collective biography of the children of a Lakota man (Miengun/Payson Wolfe) and the daughter of missionaries (Mary Jane Smith), and how the children made their way in the world of the late 1800s and early 1900s -- a world that wanted to pigeonhole them either as uncivilized Indians or as civilized white people. These folks aren't as famous as Frances Slocum/Young Bear was, but their struggles in Oklahoma and northern lower Michigan may be closer to our own experience. Gray is working on a book also: Lines Descent: Family Stories from the North Country.

"The Yankee West"

My first big shock of the New Year was realizing that I am apparently the only person on LibraryThing who owns a copy of Susan E. Gray's The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier, a microhistorical analysis of three townships in Kalamazoo County, Michigan between 1830 and 1860. (If you're a LibraryThing person who can find my techno-semiliterate mistake, please do so and post a comment!)

Even if you don't have people in the area, this book is full of insights about how things happen in predominantly Yankee or New Englander settlements in the Midwest in this crucial settlement time. (I read it avidly in the NFL playoff commercial breaks.) These folks believed in community/family values and they believed in commerce and commercial agriculture.

They were not confused, but their objective was fundamentally ambivalent: to create traditional rural communities of unlimited potential for economic growth. They wanted more of the same, only better. In realizing their goal, however, they altered forever the dialectic between market and morality. {15}

I learned about a new kind of source from her, too. She of course uses the population and agriculture census schedules, township tax rolls, and land records. But she also gets a lot out of Presbyterian and Congregational clergymen's letter reports to the New York office of the American Home Missionary Society. The explanation of how the timing of Michigan settlement, Indian "removal," and the 1840s depression made possible the survival of Ottawa Indians in the peninsula, and helped white settlers survive, is alone worth the price of admission. Please, buy this book and put it up on LibraryThing so I don't feel like quite such a geek!

What is a Midwesterner, anyway?

I've been enjoying a book that isn't easy to find. Ten top Midwest historians tackle the question of what this region without characteristics could possibly be, in The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), coedited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray. So far I'm especially fond of Cayton's essay on the "anti-region" and Purdue's John Lauritz Larson's unsparing "Pigs in Space," which grew out of his not altogether positive experience at Conner Prairie.

Cayton sets up the issue through literature: Quentin Compson, a Faulkner character, is obsessed with his relationship to his native region, the South. "The South paralyzed him, reduced him to passivity, and paved the way to suicide. Quentin believed that he could never hope to understand himself without understanding the South; that his identity was the creation of a unique interaction of peoples and environment; that he was rooted in a place that he could not escape even in the cold world of New England." {140}

What Midwesterner, real or fictive, has that strong a feeling about his or her home region?