Exiles and Pioneers
Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West

Exiles and Pioneers focuses on the experiences of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, and Potawatomi Indians from the late 1700s to the 1860s.

John P. Bowes (Author)

9780521857550, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 October 2007

286 pages
23.3 x 15.5 x 2 cm, 0.512 kg

Exiles and Pioneers is a long overdue treatment of the ninteenth-century transition of the Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, and Potawatomis as they faced removal from their homelands in the Midwest and resettled in their new homelands in Kansas." -Robbie Ethridge, Western Historical Quarterly

Exiles and Pioneers analyzes the removal and post-removal histories of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, and Potawatomi Indians. The book argues that the experience of these eastern Indians from the late 1700s to the 1860s was at its core a struggle over geographic and political place within the expanding United States. Even as American expansion limited the geographic scope of Indian lands, the extension of American territories and authority raised important questions about the political status of these Indians as individuals as well as nations within the growing republic. More specifically, the national narrative and even the prominent images of Indian removal cast the eastern Indians as exiles who were constantly pushed beyond the edges of American settlement. This study proposes that ineffective federal policies and ongoing debates within Indian communities also cast some of these eastern Indians as pioneers, unwilling trailblazers in the development of the United States.

Part I. From the Great Lakes to the Prairie Plains: 1. Border and corrider: Shawnees, Delawares, and the Mississippi River
2. Potawatomis, Delawares, and Indian removal in the Great Lakes
Part II. Becoming Border Indians: 3. Borderling subsistence and western adaptations
4. Eastern council fires in the West
5. Joseph Parks, William Walker, and the politics of change
Part III. From Kansas to exile: 6. Subtraction through division: Delawares, Wyandots, and the struggle for Kansas territory
7. Power on the western front: Shawnee and Potawatomi Indians in Kansas
Epilogue: life after exile.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK], History [HB]