Groundless

Gregory Evans Dowd masterfully “seizes upon the uncertainties in [historical] evidence to attempt a new history of the early North American colonial encounter” (p. 275). By situating rumor and legend at the center of his analysis, Dowd reveals that rumoring and hoaxes—from the beginnings of European colonization to Andrew Jackson’s campaign for Indian removal—bore great power on the frontiers of early America. In fact, rumors and legends ultimately acted as forces of violence and colonialism. In addition, Dowd uses the stories that were told about those rumors to reflect on the historical process and the profession: how historians are, at times, susceptible to “bad evidence” and perpetuate false rumors and groundless truths in their work, which Dowd admits he has mistakenly done in the past (p. 14). Dowd’s work reads like a detective story. His investigative history identifies the kernels of truth embedded within rumors and legends, which in turn provides a lens through which we can understand the sensibilities, mindsets, attitudes, and relations between Euro-American and indigenous peoples in early America. For example, Dowd traces the rumors of slavery from the Yamasee War (1715–1717) to the War of 1812 and illustrates that Native fears and anxieties of being enslaved by Europeans was fundamentally a gendered process. Real and fictive rumors about sexual violence against indigenous captives, particularly women, fueled Yamasee and Cherokee resistance to Euro-American expansion. For native peoples, then, the defense of sovereignty intersected with the protection of “childhood, womanhood, and manhood” (p. 127). On the flip side, and contrary to popular belief, Dowd demonstrates that Euro-Americans rarely, if ever, feared that Native Americans might unite with enslaved African Americans “to attempt an anticolonial union” (p. 129). It was only after the American Revolution when such rumors started to take shape, a process that emerged out of the Seminole Wars and, as Dowd concludes, “advanced the politics of Indian removal” (p. 208). Further, Dowd explores more infamous instances of rumoring and legend-making in early America, such as the murder of Jane McCrea in 1777, Benjamin Franklin’s scalping hoax during the Treaty of Paris negotiations, and the evolution of the “contemporary smallpox blanket legend” (p. 23).

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Cherokee · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Frontier · Hoax · Indigenous · Legend · Literature · Political science · Power (physics) · Romance · Rumor · American History and Culture · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law