Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920 by David C. Beyreis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920 by David C. Beyreis William S. Kiser Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920. By David C. Beyreis. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. 270. Notes, bibliography, illustrations, index.) The Bents ranked among the most well-known families in the nineteenth century American West, and this book demonstrates the many ways in which brothers William and Charles—along with their wives and biracial children—navigated the region's social and cultural systems. Using kinship as an analytical framework, David Beyreis argues that "family ties and the creation of alliance networks helped the Bents become phenomenally successful businessmen" (1). Claiming that previous books on the western frontier have placed "too much emphasis on stability and intercultural accommodation" (2), the author also aims to highlight the role of conflict and violence in shaping regional affairs. Bent family members offer a compelling case study because they participated in so many formative frontier events and processes, including the fur trade, the Santa Fe trade, Mexican land grants, Texan filibustering, the U.S. invasion of New Mexico in 1846, Indian treaty councils, U.S. Army campaigns, the 1859 Pike's Peak Gold Rush, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Dawes Act, and Indian boarding schools. Each of these themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but Beyreis ties them together in a unique way with his quasi-biographical focus on a single family. Notably, this approach allows the author to place women at the center of the narrative. Readers will come away with a clear understanding of how Hispanas like María Ignacia Jaramillo (Charles Bent's partner), Indians like Owl Woman (William Bent's wife), and their culturally mixed daughters shaped the course of events in the communities and nations to which they belonged. In addition to emphasizing female actors, the author's ethnohistorical treatment of the Southern Cheyennes and Kiowas contextualizes the central roles that Southern Plains tribes played in Bent's sophisticated but precarious trade network. "Despite the firm's general profitability," Beyreis explains, "Bent, St. Vrain and Company was never the master of its own destiny" (47) because Indigenous politics and ecological phenomena usually dictated the course of regional events. While this focus on social, cultural, and gender history demonstrates some of the complexities of doing business on the western frontier, the general absence of economic analysis leaves out a significant part of the story that also helps to explain the rise and fall of this financial empire. National economic crises in the late 1830s and late 1850s, for instance, receive little treatment in this volume, nor does the concept of merchant capitalism play meaningfully into the analytical framework. Although the Bent Family had two main branches—William was closely oriented to Cheyenne society while Charles integrated into northern New [End Page 348] Mexico's Hispano community—the book focuses more on the former than the latter. Part of this is explained by the availability of source material, but an effect of such unequal treatment is a sense that one side of the family was more historically prominent than the other. Whereas William comes across in a generally positive light, marrying a Southern Cheyenne woman and embracing certain tribal customs, Charles emerges as a deeply flawed character. A veritable misfit in Nnuevomexicano society, he cohabited with but did not marry the aforementioned Jaramillo, bribed insiders and conspired with outsiders as caprice dictated, and sometimes even spoke his racist mind. As the author points out in the conclusion, Charles Bent remains a controversial figure in New Mexico. Some still see him as a martyr, while many others believe that he got what he deserved on that fateful night in January 1847 when angry Taos residents killed and scalped him before dragging his corpse through the streets of town. The fact that one brother perished prematurely in a horrific act of corporeal mutilation while the other succumbed to natural causes two decades later speaks to the complexities and controversies surrounding outsider assimilation into these borderlands societies. Well-researched and well-written, Blood in the Borderlands is a very readable account of the Bent Family. The...