Muddy Ground - (The David J. Weber the New Borderlands History) by John William Nelson

About the Book

"John W. Nelson charts the many peoples that traversed and sought power along Chicago's portage paths from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, including Indigenous Illinois traders, French explorers, Jesuit missionaries, Meskwaki warriors, British officers, Anishinaabe headmen, and American settlers. Each group sought to harness Chicago's portages as a space of waterborne movement in a bid for wider regional control. Nelson compellingly demonstrates that even deep within the interior, power relations fluctuated based on the control of waterways and local environmental knowledge. The book challenges readers to take waterborne mobility and strategic geography seriously while showing how Native peoples, along with incoming Europeans, leveraged Chicago's waterways and portage paths to consolidate their control over the region. Pushing beyond political and cultural explanations for Indigenous-European relations and eventual US conquest in the borderlands of North America, Nelson shows how the environments in which collaboration and contest took place directly influenced such interactions"--

Book Synopsis

In early North America, carrying watercraft--usually canoes--and supplies across paths connecting one body of water to another was essential in the establishment of both Indigenous and European mobility in the continent's interior. The Chicago portage, a network of overland canoe routes that connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, grew into a crossroads of interaction as Indigenous and European people vied for its control during early contact and colonization. John William Nelson charts the many peoples that traversed and sought power along Chicago's portage paths from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, including Indigenous Illinois traders, French explorers, Jesuit missionaries, Meskwaki warriors, British officers, Anishinaabe headmen, and American settlers. Nelson compellingly demonstrates that even deep within the interior, power relations fluctuated based on the control of waterways and local environmental knowledge.

Pushing beyond political and cultural explanations for Indigenous-European relations in the borderlands of North America, Nelson places environmental and geographic realities at the center of the history of Indigenous Chicago, offering a new explanation for how the United States gained control of the North American interior through a two-pronged subjugation of both the landscapes and peoples of the continent.

Review Quotes

"An excellent environmental history of early America. By recalling the wetlands and oak savannahs that lined the southern shores of Lake Michigan, Nelson enables us to see the region through the eyes of the people who, for millenia, came to the portage to trade, hunt, fish, and gather. Muddy Ground also reminds us of the scale and impact of the United States asserting its sovereignty over the land, defying nature itself by draining wetlands and destroying their ecological abundance."--Journal of American History

"[Muddy Ground] provide[s] critical insights into the processes and impacts of altered physical, economic, and racial landscapes. . . . [Nelson] effectively connects the narrative strands of internal improvements with Indigenous dispossession. . . . The argument is sound, accessible, and persuasive. . . . [This study is] worth your time."--Indiana Magazine of History

"Nelson has impressively excavated French- and English-language sources for glimpses of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chicago. Combining those materials with Native oral histories, archaeological studies, and trade records, he convincingly demonstrates the portage's centrality to movement, commerce, colonialism, and resistance."--American Historical Review

"Tightly argued . . . Muddy Ground is an excellent book. By focusing attention on portages, it suggests novel ways of conceptualizing how Native people accumulated and exercised power from the ground up."--Environmental History

"Nelson provides an insightful perspective on the spatial transformation of the Chicago Portage as a gateway to the North American interior. . . . Muddy Ground leads the push for future studies of Native geography, diplomacy, and intercommunal relations in the dynamic spaces that connect coastal and interior waters."--Ethnohistory

"This groundbreaking study brings to light the importance of Indigenous space at a crossroads of the Great Lakes and the Great Plains."--Western Writers of America's Roundup Magazine