Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier

Confusion reigned on the colonial-era American frontier, according to this labyrinthine account. Historian Parkinson (Thirteen Clocks) profiles two intertwined families in the 18th-century Ohio Valley: the Iroquois Shickellamy family, renowned “Native brokers” who worked to foster white/Native coexistence, and the white Cresaps, whose patriarch Thomas Cresap earned the title “the Maryland Monster” for his violent clashes with Pennsylvania colonists over contested borders. The bloody Yellow Creek massacre of nearly all of the Shickellamy family on April 30, 1774, by white associates of the Cresaps sets up Parkinson’s twisty tale of both families’ fates and fortunes. With densely detailed snapshots of small- and large-scale colonial invasions and Native counterattacks over several decades, Parkinson argues that the rapidly shifting relationships and frequent side-switching among various Native, British, and American groups created an atmosphere of “bewilderment” that confounded all parties (and can occasionally confound the reader). Parkinson also intriguingly charts the “colonizing words” settlers used to encourage violence against the “other”—such as consistently referring to themselves as “aggrieved”—and sheds light on how white frontiersmen and Natives were perceived as equally “savage” by eastern colonists until the American Revolution, when patriotic easterners “embrace[d]” violent figures like the Cresaps “as part of the infant nation.” The result is a fine-grained look at life on the frontier that offers rewarding insights into the colonial mentality. (May)