A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest.

A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest. Edited by Patrick G. Williams, S. Charles Bolton, and Jeannie M. Whayne. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 228. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-55728-784-8.)

A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest is a collection of essays focusing on the southern regions of the Louisiana Purchase in the years surrounding their acquisition by the United States. Touching on issues ranging from international relations to cultural contacts and from slavery to law, the essays provide a valuable window into a world that should be better known.

Inspired by the bicentennial of the Purchase and based partly on articles originally published in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, this volume is, to some extent, a response to popular--and scholarly--tendencies to think of the Louisiana Purchase in terms of its northwestern expanse. Exemplified for most Americans by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's expedition, the exploration of the Northwest has become the stuff of legend. As Elliott West says in a fine essay from this book, Lewis and Clark have, in some sense, "kidnapped" America's historical memory of the Louisiana Purchase (p. 4). This volume gives us a broader, more complex, and more ambiguous picture.

A Whole Country in Commotion is divided into three parts. The first focuses on the general topic of expansion and reminds readers that Lewis and Clark were not the only adventurers commissioned by the Jefferson administration to explore the newly acquired lands. Articles by West, Dan Flores, and Kathleen DuVal recount Jeffersonian interest in the Red River country and ambitions extending to the Rio Grande and the relatively forgotten efforts of such figures as William Dunbar, George Hunter, Thomas Freeman, and Peter Custis to enter the uncharted terrain. All three essays vividly place American efforts in a complicated setting of conflicting Spanish, American, and Native American interests.

The second part features essays on diverse topics by Jeannie M. Whayne, S. Charles Bolton, Joseph Patrick Key, Charles F. Robinson II, and Lynn Foster. Whayne, Bolton, and Key variously examine Indian-Anglo relations and the ultimate destruction of Native American societies as a result of Anglo-American expansion. Whayne, drawing on Richard White's influential notion of the "middle ground," shows both the extent and limits of exchange between Native Americans and Anglo-Americans and the complex political, economic, and cultural factors that helped to shape possibilities for exchange (p. 59). Bolton and Key recount the debates and processes that led to the forced removal of native peoples from Arkansas and the Old Southwest.

Robinson and Foster look in slightly different directions. Robinson reminds us that westward expansion meant slavery's expansion into the fertile cotton lands of the trans-Mississippi frontier. And he also reminds us that it was a very brutal incarnation of American slavery--an institution that renders untenable any popular tendencies to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase as a story of American progress. Foster, looking at the evolution of the legal system through early court records and documents, describes a region in which legal order took its place slowly and fitfully and portrays a litigious society that truly deserves to be thought of as a legal frontier.

Anthropologist George Sabo III concludes the volume with an analysis of a Caddo Indian ceremony, the Turkey Dance, to explore Native American perceptions of historical contacts and conflicts. He shows that the era has had as much significance for the historical memory of Native Americans as it has for others, though for reasons that, echoing Robinson's essay, should give pause to more triumphalist accounts of the Purchase and its significance.

In sum, the editors have succeeded in creating a book that considerably enriches our understanding of one of the most frequently told stories of the American past. Historians will find much here to enrich their own accounts of early American history.

DICKSON D. BRUCE JR.

University of California, Irvine