American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State.

American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State. By Stephen Aron. A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, c. 2006. Pp. xxiv, 301. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-253-34691-9.)

From earliest times the strategic locality where the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers converge in the North American heartland was a popular site for human habitation. In this path-breaking study, Stephen Aron aptly dubs that culturally fluid and hotly contested zone the American confluence. By opting for that designation, he eschews the use of modern borders to delineate a region where boundaries remained in flux until the early nineteenth century.

Frequent contacts in the American confluence among indigenous people and representatives of competing imperial powers produced a host of intercultural and intercolonial interactions that were as varied as their participants were diverse, and those compelling encounters are the focal points of this book. Aron's well-crafted narrative spans the final two-thirds of the eighteenth century and the first one-third of the nineteenth century, bringing both the place and its people to life. In constructing his account Aron draws on a substantial body of existing scholarship, and, while the details he cites may not be new, the context is. By placing familiar developments within the expanded framework of a complex and evolving borderland, he connects local and regional history to the larger questions of conquest, imperial rivalries, and cultural and political consolidation.

In the late eighteenth century members of the dominant Osage nation fended off Indian and European challengers alike with skillful diplomacy and carefully cultivated partnerships with French traders. The cosmopolitan and savvy francophone entrepreneurs who had taken up residence in the confluence region likewise parlayed their frontier business ventures into profitable global enterprises. The Creole frontier settlements in St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve may have been remote, but they were far from isolated.

During the nearly four decades that Spain claimed authority over the Missouri frontier, the French and the Osage managed to hold their own, even as the Spanish dons sought to strengthen their tenuous control by inviting Anglo-American settlers and Shawnee and Delaware emigres to move there. The newcomers from the East made accommodations with their new neighbors, and together they fashioned a place far more peaceful than the bloody ground of the Ohio Valley, where conflict reigned supreme during the post-Revolutionary era.

The Louisiana Purchase ushered in a gradual transition in the trans-Mississippi borderland frontier as a deluge of American newcomers felt emboldened to challenge established norms. French Creoles and their Indian neighbors struggled to confront the new realities caused by the sudden turn of events. Despite the waning of constraints from competing colonial powers, the establishment of uncontested U.S. sovereignty in the American confluence was not immediate. Rival factions waged pitched battles for control in the increasingly volatile region. American territorial officials struggled to curb individual feuds and personal grudges even as they attempted to resolve the larger questions posed by the introduction of American polities and practices. When General James Wilkinson's actions exacerbated those tensions, President Thomas Jefferson turned to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, recently returned from their journey to the Pacific, for assistance in restoring stability in the

troubled region. It was a tall order, especially given the rising threat posed by the British and their Indian allies. While guiding the Americanization process amid the terrors of warfare and earthquakes, Lewis and Clark drew on the diplomatic skills they had honed during their western travels. Ultimately the Indians were the biggest losers as U.S. policies of tribal relocation and dispossession increasingly took their toll.

The end of the War of 1812 sealed their fate and helped launch a new political era that signaled the triumph of American sovereignty in the confluence region. A combative new brand of democracy grounded in a belief that ordinary men could aspire to greatness and a companion view that Indians stood in the way of settlement and progress had supplanted notions prevalent under the French and Spanish regimes. The contentious slavery issue that momentarily threatened to untrack Missouri's bid for statehood quickly became the driving force in Missouri politics as the new state transitioned from a frontier borderland to a border state.

Aron deftly traces those changes in this welcome addition to historical scholarship. American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State joins his earlier book How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, 1996) as a must-read for students of western American history.

WILLIAM E. FOLEY

Central Missouri State University