Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 by Susan Sleeper-Smith

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-635
Author(s):  
Shelby Johnson
Keyword(s):  
River Valley ◽  
Ohio River ◽  
Ohio River Valley ◽  
Indian Women

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Sleeper-Smith
Keyword(s):  
River Valley ◽  
Ohio River ◽  
Ohio River Valley ◽  
American Indian Women ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Agricultural Work ◽  
Wabash River ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Diverse World ◽  
Village Life

Examines the Ohio River valley though an environmental lens and explores the role that American Indian women played in creating a sedentary agrarian village world in this rich and fertile landscape. Focuses on the crescent of Indian communities located along the banks of the Wabash River valley, a major Ohio tributary, to trace the evolution of the agrarian-trading nexus that shaped village life. The agricultural work of Indian women and their involvement in an Indian-controlled fur trade provides a glimpse into a flourishing village world that has escaped historical attention and refutes the notion that this region was continually torn asunder by warfare. Trade and diplomacy allowed Indians to successfully control the Ohio River valley until the late eighteenth century, with neither the French nor the British exercising hegemony over these lands. Instead, Indians incorporated numerous Europeans and vast numbers of Indian refugees into their highly diverse world, enabling different Algonquian-speaking Indians to live adjacent to and with each other, eventually paving the way for the Pan-Indian Confederacies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Indian world that Americans encountered in the 1780s was an Indian-controlled landscape that they had long defended from repeated foreign intrusions, not the middle ground of fragmented Native groups associated with imperial contact. Until the crushing defeat at Fallen Timbers in 1794, Indians believed that Americans were another wave of intruders that could be repulsed.

The Evolution of the Indian Fur Trade

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-104
Author(s):  
Susan Sleeper-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fur Trade ◽  
River Valley ◽  
Ohio River ◽  
Ohio River Valley ◽  
Green Bay ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Western Great Lakes ◽  
Trading Network

Green Bay was an early center of a precontact Indian trading network that stretched throughout the western Great Lakes. In the mid-seventeenth century, large numbers of Indian households were drawn to Green Bay from the Ohio River valley to trade with recently arrived French traders. Many Ohio Indians, especially the Miami, sent households to Green Bay to secure access to the manufactured trade goods available from the French. Movement was often voluntary, and not all Indians were driven west to seek refuge from the Iroquois. A brisk beaver trade led to an oversupply of furs in French warehouses, and Versailles reacted by closing the western trade. Without access to European goods, Indians returned to the Ohio River valley, where they began trading with the English and rapidly assumed control of the fur trade. For more than twenty years, the French trade remained closed, and the numerous Frenchmen who remained took up residence in Indian households, often marrying Indian women “in the manner of the country.” The fur trade ban encouraged Indian resettlement in the Ohio River valley, where Indians had access to highly desirable furs in the Black Swamp, The ban on the western trade refocused the fur trade to a region little explored by the French and controlled by Indians.

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