America’s First West: The Trans-Appalachian West, 1754–1815

Kakel, Carroll P.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_3

Carroll P. Kakel III²

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Abstract

This chapter looks at the period 1754 to 1815—from the eve of the French and Indian War to the end of the War of 1812—during the second phase of the War for North America. It traces and interprets events during this period, within the book’s main themes: conquest (invasion and occupation); dispossession (theft of Indigenous lands and resources); depopulation (the logic of elimination and the genocidal imperative); and repopulation (supplanting the Indigenous inhabitants). It also summarizes the demographic and geopolitical outcome of the second phase of the Anglo-American settler-colonial supplanting project.

I expect to pass the remnant of a life … in ruminating on past scenes, & contemplating the future grandeur of this rising [American] Empire.

George Washington (1799, quoted in Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War, 205)

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Notes

1.
Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansionism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 3. Walter Nugent uses the term ‘transappalachia’ to describe the region.
2.
François Furstenberg, ‘The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in American History, c. 1754–1815’, The American Historical Review, 113, no. 2 (2008): 650.
3.
Ibid., 650–651.
4.
Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 331–332.
5.
Furstenberg, ‘Trans-Appalachian Frontier’, The American Historical Review, 650.
6.
Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 313–314.
7.
Furstenberg, ‘Trans-Appalachian Frontier’, The American Historical Review, 650.
8.
Taylor, Colonial America, 113–114.
9.
Nobles, American Frontiers, 64.
10.
Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War, xiv–xv.
11.
Claudio Saunt, ‘The Age of Imperial Expansion, 1763–1821’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 77.
12.
Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 281.
13.
Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 53.
14.
Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 509.
15.
Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 338.
16.
Ibid., 367. Recent scholarship on the American Revolution has offered fresh interpretations which challenge traditional understandings. For a landmark study which gives equal attention to western issues and the clash over taxes as causes of the revolution, see Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016). For a ground-breaking study which convincingly argues that white fears of ‘savage’ American Indians and ‘insurrectionary’ African American slaves brought white colonists together in ‘common cause’ against the British , see Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). For a compelling study which argues (rightly, in my view) that hatred of Indians and desire for their lands played a decisive role in fueling the revolution, see Patrick Spero, Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765–1776 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018).
17.
Colin G. Calloway, Colin G., The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xv.
18.
Snyder, ‘The South’, 323.
19.
Alan Taylor, ‘Land and Liberty on the Post-Revolutionary Frontier’, in Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic, ed. David Thomas Konig (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 85.
20.
Nugent, Habits of Empire, 73–74.
21.
Mark S. Joy, American Expansionism 1783–1860: A Manifest Destiny? (London: Pearson Education Limited, 2003), 34.
22.
Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War, xvii.
23.
For the details, see Grenier, The First Way of War.
24.
Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 76.
25.
Grenier, The First Way of War, 15.
26.
Ibid., 205.
27.
DuVal, ‘Living in a Reordered World’, 71.
28.
Jill Doerfler and Erik Redix, ‘The Great Lakes’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 176.
29.
Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York: Viking, 2007), 126.
30.
Neal Salisbury, ‘The Atlantic Northeast’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 349.
31.
Michael Witgen, ‘American Indians in World History’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 603.
32.
Saunt, ‘The Age of Imperial Expansion’, 86.
33.
Nugent, Habits of Empire, 40.
34.
Quoted in Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), xii.
35.
Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 73.
36.
Calloway, ‘Treaties and Treaty Making’, 540.
37.
R. Douglas Hurt, The Indian Frontier, 1783–1846 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), xv.
38.
Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 141.
39.
Calloway, ‘Treaties and Treaty Making’, 543–544.
40.
Dorothy V. Jones, License for Empire: Colonialism by Treaty in Early America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 186.
41.
Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, 139–141.
42.
Quoted in Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 355.
43.
Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, 283.
44.
Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 65–66.
45.
Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 3.
46.
Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 66–67.
47.
Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War, 190–191.
48.
Saunt, ‘The Age of Imperialism’, 77.
49.
Nugent, Habits of Empire, 12.
50.
McConnell, A Country Between, 281.
51.
Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 242.
52.
Grenier, The First Way of War, 14–15, 205.
53.
Quoted in Anthony F. C., Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 163; italics are mine.
54.
Francis Jennings, The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 282.
55.
Jeffrey Ostler, ‘“Just and Lawful War”: as Genocidal War in the (United States) Northwest Ordinance in the Northwest Territory, 1787–1832’, Journal of Genocide Research 18, no. 1 (2016): 1–20.
56.
Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 40.
57.
Lenore A. Stiffarm with Phil Lane, Jr., ‘The Demography of Native North America’, in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 33.
58.
Thornton, American Indian Holocaust, 65–66.
59.
Grenier, The First Way of War, 144.
60.
Elizabeth A. Fenn, ‘Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century America: Beyond Jeffrey Amherst’, Journal of American History 86, no. 4 (2000): 1553.
61.
Quoted in Grenier, The First Way of War, 144.
62.
Fenn, ‘Biological Warfare’, Journal of American History, 1553.
63.
Nobles, American Frontiers, 127.
64.
Griffin, American Leviathan, 256.
65.
Troy D. Smith, Troy D., ‘Indian Territory and Oklahoma’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 359.
66.
Quoted in Kulikoff, From British Peasants, 292.
67.
Quoted in Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 235.
68.
Furstenberg, ‘Trans-Appalachian Frontier’, The American Historical Review, 652. Also, Nugent, Habits of Empire, 6–7.
69.
Nobles, American Frontiers, 91–92. At the time of the settler revolt, the Anglo-American population of the region was less than 25,000 people (Nugent, Habits of Empire, 15).
70.
Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 371.
71.
Saunt, ‘The Age of Imperial Expansion’, 83. As Saunt notes, each decade between 1790 and 1820, it would continue to grow by 30 percent (ibid.).
72.
DuVal, ‘Living in a Reordered World’, 71.
73.
Kulikoff, From British Peasants, 284–285.
74.
Witgen, ‘American Indians in World History’, 603.
75.
Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History, 3.
76.
Kulikoff, From British Peasants, 288.
77.
Nugent, Habits of Empire, 45.
78.
Kulikoff, From British Peasants, 288.
79.
Quoted in Snyder, ‘The South’, 323.
80.
Hine and Faragher, The American West, 121.
81.
Nobles, American Frontiers, 128.
82.
Nugent, Habits of Empire, 43, 45–46.
83.
Ibid., 39.
84.
Nugent, Into the West, 65.
85.
Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 70–71.
86.
Saunt, ‘The Age of Imperial Expansion’, 77–78, 86–87.
87.
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
88.
The phrase is Allan Kulikoff’s; see Kulikoff, From British Peasants, 292.

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Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Carroll P. Kakel III

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Kakel, C.P. (2019). America’s First West: The Trans-Appalachian West, 1754–1815. In: A Post-Exceptionalist Perspective on Early American History. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21305-3_3
Published: 17 August 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21304-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21305-3
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