Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West by Stephen Aron (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West by Stephen Aron Eran Zelnik (bio) Keywords Western history, Alternative history, Daniel Boone, Indigenous people, Lewis and Clark, Oregon Trail, Dodge City Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West. By Stephen Aron. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 320. Cloth, $29.95.) Alternative histories of the west that attempt to complicate, or flat out contradict, declension narratives have been at a premium for several decades [End Page 349] now. Perhaps most famously, after Richard White wrote The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment and Social Change among Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, NE, 1983), in his next book he sought to frustrate this account of Native American decline, and the result was one of the most influential histories of the west, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991). In recent decades, perhaps the most noteworthy histories in this vein were Pekka Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT, 2009) and Kathleen DuVal's The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006), which related narratives of indigenous strength and dominance over European and other Native adversaries. In Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West, Stephen Aron brings his deep familiarity with western history to tell a story that differs markedly from traditional narratives of "bloody ethnic cleansings and even genocides" (4). Yet, this study is something of an inversion of DuVal and Hämäläinen's stories of Native power. Instead, Aron "seeks out sites and situations in which colonialism wore a different face and relations between Indians, settlers, and states deviated (for a time) from the monolithic logic of elimination" (4). Even as it attempts to retrieve episodes that challenge the violent framing of most western histories, Peace and Friendship also steers clear of "wishtories": fictionalized "stories about the past" that "cater to contemporary yearnings," such as Disney's Pocahontas or any other "'kumbaya' version of colonialism" (6), for that matter. To do so, Aron takes us on a stroll across the continent that begins with Daniel Boone; Chapter 1 takes place in Revolutionary Kentucky, while Chapter 2 follows Boone down the Ohio River to the region surrounding Apple Creek. Here around the turn of the eighteenth century, Shawnees and Anglo settlers like Boone led something of a peaceful coexistence. This is probably Aron's strongest chapter, in which he provides a good amount of compelling and relatively less familiar evidence regarding the genial relationships fostered between Anglos and Shawnees under Spanish auspices. In Chapter 4, however, we learn that these relationships soured by the War of 1812. Chapter 3 follows Lewis and Clark's famous Corps of Discovery expedition that set out from St. Louis in 1804, while Chapter 5 examines the relationships between Great Plains Indians and settlers on the so-called Oregon Trail from the 1820s through the 1850s. In both cases, Aron sorts [End Page 350] out myth from reality, contending, for example, with the legacy of the famous computer game The Oregon Trail in shaping the memory of the period. Lastly, Chapter 6 explores the history of Dodge City during its heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century, first as a depot for Buffalo hunters, and later as the end destination of cowboys driving cattle up from Texas. As before, Aron contends that violence, in this supposedly notorious hub of gunslingers, was not as ubiquitous as mythologies of the west would have us believe. Aron's study is an intriguing proposition, while his deep familiarity with the materials and his easy and nimble prose make the book an engrossing read. However, by prioritizing narrative flow and a cast of familiar characters and episodes from American history, the book runs into two considerable shortcomings. First—and this is a pitfall many historians (including myself) often fall into—too much of the narrative conveys the historical context in which such fleeting moments of "peace and friendship" first emerged and then disappeared. As a result, far too little of the book relates episodes and evidence of peace and...