Frontier Swashbuckler

Frontier Swashbuckler: The Life and Legend of John Smith T. By Dick Steward. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 264. $34.95.) The names of important individuals dot the pages of American history books. Many such individuals came from the social and economic elites of the time, and often their families remained prominent for generations. Another group of people strove to join those in the upper ranks of society. Often they achieved success for a time only to fall back out of the limelight and the historical record after a brief appearance there. Usually characters of regional importance, they sought to break into the national scene, failed, and then grudgingly drifted into obscurity. John Smith T was one such person. This volume in the Missouri Biography Series traces his life. Smith grew to adulthood in a well-placed Virginia family. His grandfather served in the House of Burgesses, was an officer in the colonial militia, and amassed considerable land and slaves. However, declining soil fertility and continually growing families forced the next generations to seek opportunities on the frontier. Steward's central thesis is that for over forty years John Smith T epitomized the reckless and driving nature of the post-independence generation of American expansionists who sought opportunity on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century frontiers. Desirable lands invited the ambitious, reckless, and greedy as they sought to strip the Spanish and Indians of territory. By the 1790s, young Smith had added the T to his name in order to differentiate his claims from those of the host of other John Smiths seeking land in Tennessee and Alabama. In fact, by that time, Smith T held claims to over a quarter-million acres. By 1797 Smith T had crossed the Mississippi into Spanish-held Missouri, where he would spend much of the rest of his life, although he returned to Tennessee and Kentucky repeatedly to oversee his investments there. In Missouri, he moved into the lead mining region, rapidly becoming a major competitor of Moses Austin, who dominated the lead industry. For the next twenty years, the two men fought bitterly to control the mining economy. This involved them in numerous-and occasionally violent-confrontations and nearly endless court suits. The author depicts his subject as operating in a gray area between wilderness conquest and the strictures of the law and stable government (19-20). Steward shows how these early frontier leaders seemed to justify violence, law-breaking, and occasionally nearly treasonable actions in terms of profit and economic development. During his career, Smith T met and dealt with many men who played important roles in early American settlement of the Mississippi Valley. He cooperated with-and at times competed with-the odious General James Wilkinson. At other times he quarreled with Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston. His active participation in the failed Burr Conspiracy led to temporary disgrace and his being stripped of his appointed governmental positions. As a would-be entrepreneur, Smith T encountered numerous failures. In 1811 he led a force of miners up the Mississippi to Dubuque's Mines only to be driven out by the enraged Indians who mined the lead there themselves

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Frontier · Genealogy · Legend · American Environmental and Regional History · History

• All for Keeping His Own Negro Wench”

  Open Access•Mark M Carroll•Law and History Review•2011

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