8 - “A terrible sickness among them”: Smallpox and stories of the frontier

Summary

Histories of North America have largely ignored, marginalized, or discounted the contributions of Native North American historians. As a result, the official story has been, as Annette Kolodny says, “univocal and monolingual, defining origins by what later became the tropes of the dominant or conquering language” (12). Kolodny calls for a reopening of the frontier, a reassessment “thematizing frontier as a multiplicity of ongoing first encounters over time and land, rather than as a linear chronology of successive discoveries and discrete settlements. … There can be no paradigmatic first contact because there are so many first encounters. And there can be no single overarching story” (13). Richard White's detailed exploration of the history of the Great Lakes area from 1650 to 1815 is a step in the direction Kolodny proposes, but even this impressive revisionist account of the pays d'en haut, as he calls it, omits the work of Native historians. However, White's paradigm of the eighteenth-century northwest frontier as a space defined by multi-interest negotiation, compromise, and improvisation provides a useful framework for examining the ways in which nineteenth-century historians, writing in the context of literary romanticism, conceptualized the frontier of the previous century.

Colonial history of the Western Hemisphere fascinated American historians a hundred years later. Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and Willard Motley perceived conflicts like the conquest of Mexico or Peru as the working out in the hemisphere of the destinies of the European world powers.