"The Chiefs Now in This City": Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America by Colin G. Calloway

Abstract

Reviewed by: "The Chiefs Now in This City": Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America by Colin G. Calloway Kate Fullagar "The Chiefs Now in This City": Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America. By Colin G. Calloway. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 283 pages. Cloth, ebook. At the enormous conference between Indigenous and colonial leaders in Augusta, Georgia, in November 1763, a Cherokee leader from Chota staged a piece of political theater. Kittagusta, "the Prince of Chota," stretched out before the assembled delegates "a string of beads with three knots." He explained that the first knot was Chota, the leading town of the Overhill Cherokee. The last knot was Charleston, the main town of the Carolina colonists. The knot in between was Fort Prince George, the small British encampment that had served as a major trading depot through the 1750s and was the site of a treacherous colonial massacre of Cherokee hostages in 1760. Three years later, Kittagusta expressed hope that the talks between each town "shall always be kept straight."1 Kittagusta's theatrical flourish speaks to many of the themes of Colin G. Calloway's "The Chiefs Now in This City": Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America. Firstly, the book shows how strongly Native Americans in the early modern era incorporated colonial centers into their own geographies. Secondly, it demonstrates that they understood those centers in relational and comparative ways to their own towns. Finally, Calloway emphasizes a history of nonviolent exchange and communication between Natives and European settlers in early North America that is often swamped by the more dramatic episodes of warfare and bloodshed. Kittagusta's pointed inclusion of Fort Prince George's darker role in the Cherokees' past, as a site of massacre as well as of trade, also reminded his audience that he never forgot the deception and danger that colonists always posed—a theme to which Calloway's book gestures perhaps less than Kittagusta would have liked. Though Calloway flags the "dispossession and racial violence" (194) of colonial American history, he focuses most of his attention on the way that Indians negotiated for peace, trade, and work, and on how they "adapted to new pressures" (3). This decision to emphasize the more peaceful forms of encounter between Natives and settlers is deliberate; noting the magnitude of work—including his own—that already exists on treaties and frontier violence, Calloway argues here for a deeper inquiry into [End Page 458] all the other forms of interaction between these two groups of people in North America. This quest leads him to the colonial town. As Calloway remarks, "Chiefs Now in This City" were far more common sights than either contemporaries or later historians have recognized. He stresses that the image of Indians beating a steady if melancholy retreat further and further into the so-called backcountry as the settler revolution advanced westward with relentless force is a damaging myth that obscures how "Indian people frequently moved toward rather than away from them [urban areas], as they responded to new centers of power … and took advantage of new economic opportunities" (3). In other words, Calloway shows that Indians recognized dividing lines in the middle of newcomer settlements rather than beyond their horizons and also that these edges could be the basis of productive as well as destructive relationships. He adds to Patrick Spero's recent dictum that frontiers existed "anywhere Indians were" by revealing how, from a Native perspective, they popped up "anywhere colonists were" (4).2 There are disadvantages to Calloway's emphasis on the positive elements of Native-European interactions, though. Balancing narratives of tragedy and possibility is the hardest and most common problem for any historian of Native America; to gain a fuller understanding in this case, "The Chiefs Now in This City" might best be read alongside some of Calloway's own earlier books, especially The American Revolution in Indian Country and Pen and Ink Witchcraft, which more fully detailed Indian bloodshed and cultural loss.3 "The Chiefs Now in This City" covers the entire Eastern Seaboard of North America, from the Mi'kmaqs in Canada's eastern Maritimes to the Creek near Saint...