Description A riveting account of the conquest of the vast American heartland that offers a vital reconsideration of the relationship between Native Americans and European colonists, and the pivotal role of the mighty Mississippi.
We cannot understand the trajectory of early America without taking into account the vast heartland and its waterways, which advanced and thwarted the aspirations of Native nations, European imperialists, and American settlers alike..
Masters of the Middle Waters shows that the Mississippi and its tributaries were never simply a backdrop to unfolding events.
When American settlers claimed the region in the early nineteenth century, they overturned 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans.
Over the next century, a succession of European empires claimed parts of the midcontinent, but they all faced the challenge of navigating Native alliances and social structures that had existed for centuries.
With a complex network of allies stretching from Lake Superior to Arkansas, the Illinois were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers--fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette--made their way down the Mississippi.
Lee traces the Native kinship ties that determined which Nations rose and fell in the period before the Illinois became dominant.
In this ambitious and elegantly written account of the conquest of the West, Jacob Lee offers a new understanding of early America based on the long history of warfare and resistance in the Mississippi River valley.
Cutting a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River meant wealth, knowledge, and power for those who could master it.
America\'s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication.
Description A riveting account of the conquest of the vast American heartland that offers a vital reconsideration of the relationship between Native Americans and European colonists, and the pivotal role of the mighty Mississippi
