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Merrell suggests that however much Crevecoeur expected and others wanted Indians to go away (literally or culturally) in the 1780s, they hadn't and wouldn't for another two generations. Most of the continent north of the Rio Grande was still "Indian Country"; vast stretches of land remained under Native control, as they had been before the arrival of the first Europeans.
Even more telling, Indians retained a presence almost everywhere whites lived in post-Revolutionary America. Face-to-face contacts were far more commonplace in the late eighteenth century than we might imagine. Citizens of the new nation were accustomed to seeing and interacting with Natives. That would no longer be the case four or five decades later. By the 1830s, Indians had become little more than a novelty or a curiosity to most East Coast residents. What happened in the intervening years to bring about such a dramatic change is far less clear than it once seemed.
Simply acknowledging that this change occurred is more than many past students of the early Republic have managed. The essays in this volume, however, go a good deal further. For one thing, they show that there was no single path that all Natives traveled to arrive at their obscurity in white eyes. Nor was that destination so inevitable that Indian choices never mattered. Or to put it another way, Indians participated in their own history; they were important agents in shaping and responding to their circumstances, not the helpless victims of some preordained destiny.
Complexity and contingency consequently replace uniformity and predictability as major themes in these new accounts of Native Americans during the early Republic. As such, they sound a similar chord to what Ira Berlin has recently claimed regarding the history of slaves and slavery in North America during its first two centuries and to what Peter Charles Hoffer has argued for early American history in general. In the latter's words, "irony, contradiction, and contingency" were at the heart of the "unpredictable course" of events in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[3]
For Indians, few events were more contingent than America's War for Independence. As Colin Calloway rehearses the story in the book's prologue, Natives were determined to secure their own freedom during the American Revolution, but they were unsure which potential ally, if any, held the brightest promise of winning a victory advantageous to Indians. When forced to take sides, they split, not only between but within tribes. As a result, "the Revolution assumed the look of a civil war" for many Indian peoples. The losses they incurred only became compounded following the Treaty of Paris, for whether they had supported or opposed the colonial victors, Indians remained at war after 1783, now contesting with the influx of aggressive settlers who flooded westward in search of a better life. And if war and invasion were not enough, "economic dislocation, political factionalism and fragmentation, disruption of ancient traditions, hunger, disease, and betrayal into the hands of their enemies" soon beset Native American communities from New York to Georgia.
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