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Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier. By David Andrew Nichols. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Pp. [xiv], 291. $39.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-2768-8.)
Few areas in the world were as hotly contested in the late eighteenth century as trans-Appalachian North America. David Andrew Nichols's study of United States Indian policy from the end of the American War for Independence through the election of President Thomas Jefferson reminds readers that the ultimate triumph of the United States - and with it the ethnic cleansing and removal of native peoples - was not inevitable. Nor were the American Indians, Americans, and Europeans who lived in the region (or sought to transform it) members of static categories defined by race and nationality. Politics, broadly understood, was more than a straightforward division between a monolithic group of land-hungry whites and a monolithic group of angry Indians determined to resist them at every step; instead, a process of extended, contingent, and unstable interaction among fluctuating groups who generally misunderstood and misrepresented each other characterized the politics of the region. For most people, the acquisition and exercise of power...