A Man of Distinction among Them: Alexander McKee and the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799

Abstract

A Man of Distinction Among Them: Alexander McKee and the Ohio Country Frontier, 1754-1799. By Larry L. Nelson. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1999. Pp. xv, 262. Illustrations, maps. $35.00.) On the surface, Larry L. Nelson's account of British Indian agent Alexander McKee seems part of very old historiography: biographies of relatively low-level government officials on the frontier. One of the more recent, and more effective, of such works is Reginald Horsman's more-than-three-- decades-old study, Matthew Elliott: British Indian Agent (1964). But appearances can be deceiving. With A Man of Distinction Among Them, Nelson reworks this approach by situating his subject within framework established by the most up-to-date scholarship, not only on the upper Ohio Valley and British Indian policy, but also on cultural mediation and frontier interactions. In particular, he relies heavily upon Richard White's influential analysis of the middle ground to understand the world in which McKee acted (The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 [1991]). For Nelson, Alexander McKee was the classic cultural mediator. Nelson presents him as the mixed-race child of an Irish immigrant fur trader and Shawnee woman (it seems probable that she was white captive who had been raised by the Shawnees). Born around 1735 on the western Pennsylvania frontier, McKee grew up at time and place when the barriers of race, culture, and nation were permeable. In the late 1760s, he married Shawnee (though, like his mother, she appears to have been white adoptee). McKee maintained dual existence, with homes and stores in both native villages and white settlements until at least the late 1770s. Unlike most cultural mediators, however, McKee was, Nelson argues, not marginal man whose standing in each of the cultures in which he operated was always tenuous (xiii). Instead, he was highly respected in both worlds. With the outbreak of war in the upper Ohio Valley in the mid-1750s, McKee began to serve the British government as an interpreter and envoy. Over the next four decades, he rose through the ranks of the British Indian department, acting as agent, commissary, and, for the final years of his life, deputy superintendant and inspector general. At the same time, he engaged in the fur trade, speculated in land, and operated store. These activities placed him at the center of Anglo-Indian relations during the Seven Years War, Pontiac's Rebellion, Dunmore's War, the American Revolution, and the continuing war between the Ohio Indians and the United States that persisted until the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville. In Nelson's appraisal, McKee was a figure throughout these decades (x). It is in elaborating McKee's pivotal role in these events that Nelson suggests the promise and reveals the shortcomings of this book. For much of his service, McKee was critical-if not the only-conduit between the British government and some native villages and groups. …