The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South.

The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South. By Eric E. Bowne. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c. 2005. Pp. [xii], 144. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8173-5178-7; cloth, $48.00, ISBN 0-8173-1454-7.)

The Westo peoples, although often depicted as a historical footnote, do represent something quite significant. They were the harbingers of the dramatic and violent expansion of English colonialism into the Deep South. Appearing near the Savannah River sometime around 1660, gun-wielding Westos conducted raids that sent thousands of Native American captives into the possession of Virginians and then Carolinians. Until Carolinians and Shawnees destroyed them around 1680, the Westos dominated the Southeast, causing substantial social upheaval and population movements that remade the social landscape.

Given the Westos' significance, Eric E. Bowne's concise monograph is a welcomed addition to the historiography of the American South. The bulk of Bowne's analysis concerns the question of the Westos' origins, something specialists have debated for a long time. Essentially, Bowne agrees with the proposal first made by Verner Crane in 1918 that the mysterious tribe derived from the Eries, a people that the Five Nations Iroquois displaced from the Northeast during the Beaver Wars. Others have taken issue with Crane's hypothesis, arguing instead that Westos were originally Yuchis from the Tennessee Valley or a displaced tribe from Virginia. Bowne convincingly demonstrates that Crane was right but admits that the Westos adopted a large number of captives and incorporated remnant groups from diverse locations. Probably of more interest to nonspecialists is Bowne's discussion of the Westos' power in the American South. Their use of firearms, aggressive tactics imported from the Iroquois, and connections to the English gave them tremendous advantages over indigenous groups. Using such advantages, the Westos depopulated much of the Oconee watershed, forcing the retreat of the Yamasee people to Florida; they afflicted Siouan-speakers in the Carolina coastal plain and Piedmont, setting the stage for the ethnogenesis of the Catawbas; and they struck Muskogean and Hitchiti speakers to the west, helping to catalyze the development of the Creek Confederacy. Westo raids also began the destruction of the Spanish mission system among the Guales of the Georgia coast. Such important events should not be overlooked in any history of the American South, making Bowne's work salient to specialists and nonspecialists alike.

While Bowne makes an important scholarly contribution, this reviewer would have liked to have seen him expand his rather short analysis in two key ways. First, the connection between the Westos and Virginia deserves a more thorough treatment. The Westos' slave raids coincided with Virginia's gradual legalization of race-based slavery, but Bowne unfortunately does not cite Edmund S. Morgan's classic American Slavery/American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975). Perhaps this oversight can be attributed to Bowne's training as an anthropologist, but such training should have prevented the second way in which the book falls short. He could have been more thorough in his discussion of the archaeological record. Analysis of the archaeological records of the Tennessee, Coosa, Savannah, and Chattahoochee Rivers is lacking. Despite these two drawbacks, The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South is a valuable work of ethnohistory that sheds much-needed light on a little understood but very important period in southern history.

PAUL KELTON

University of Kansas