Wigwams west: A native American model of frontier development, by Joseph P. Alessi.

Abstract

Over the past forty years, socholars retold the story ofNative Americans and, unlike their predecesoors, portrayed them as active participants in their own history. No longer viewed as being the measuring stick of ''white''progress or atrocities, historians placed the emphasis on Native Americans, their actions, their culture and their active resistance to acculturation and assimilation through a unique process of accommodation. However while they accomplished much, few historians attempted to explain how Native Americans influenced the development of America and continued to regard the majority of their activities as methods of cultural resistance. In an attempt to answer the question of'how Native Americans influenced the development of America," this study examines the impact that Native American urban settlements had on the Anglo-American westward movement and argues that Native Americans "spearheaded" and supported the Euro-American settlement of the west. The focus of this work is on the Native American urban settlement of Logstown and its relationship to the founding and building of Fort Pitt in the Ohio Valley during the mid-eighteenth century. To show the relationship between Logstown and Fort Pitt, this study proposes a model of frontier development that includes Native Americans and their urban settlements in the developmmt of America. The model expands and synthesizes the works of Kenneth Lewis, Richard C. Wade and Francis Jennings and deals primarily with the Eastern Native American group;who migrated west and settled the Ohio Valley, the Shawnee, Lenni-Lenape (Delaware) and Mingo. By applying this approach, this study discovered three things. First, Native American and Euro-American cultures created similar types of preindustrial societies in regards to institutional development. Second, Native Americans built frontier urban settlements that provided to be the catalyst behind the Euro-American settlement of the west. Lastly, the early settlement of the west by Euro-Americans succeeded as a result of Native American political, physical, military andi nformational support. With this study, the author hopes to accomplish two main objectives. First, he wishes to present a study of Native Americans that breaks from the traditional theme that permeates throughout historical scholarship in regards to Native Americans, ''barriers and resisters to progress." And second, the author hopes to answer the concerns of critics to new Indian and cultural history by presenting a broader interpretation of Native American history that utilizes an ethnohistorical approach and addresses a more ''weighty question" of American history.