Review: Joseph P. Alessi's Settling the Frontier: Urban Development in America's Borderlands, 1600–1830

Reviewed by Elana Krischer

Settling the Frontier: Urban Development in America's Borderlands, 1600–1830
By Joseph P. Alessi
Westholme Publishing, 2020
296 pages

The stories in Joseph P. Alessi’s Settling the Frontier are familiar ones. Europeans, drawn by Native trade networks, voyaged to North American ill-prepared for survival. Without Native American assistance, most of these European traders would not have survived let alone established permanent settlements. Alessi delves more deeply into these stories, and claims that the foundation for European settlement in North American began before Europeans ever arrived. By establishing complex settlements of their own, Native Americans laid the foundation for the creation of early frontier towns. Alessi’s argument is simple: Native Americans were integral to the establishment of American settlement.

The book has impressive geographical and temporal range. Instead of frontier settlements, Alessi argues that each area of focus was a borderland with middle ground interactions as defined by Richard White’s 1991 work The Middle Ground. Each borderland region saw mutual accommodation between Native Americans and Euroamericans as they depended on each other for economic, social, and political growth. The book is divided into two parts. The first part titled “The Frontier’s First Settlements” examines the establishment of Pecos, Mohawk and Mahican, Ohioan, and Chinook settlements prior to European colonization. Part two titled “Resettling the American Frontier” chronicles the Spanish settlement of Santa Fe in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Dutch settlement of Fort Orange and New Amsterdam in the 17th century, the English settlement of Fort Pitt in the 18th century, and the English and American settlement of Forts Vancouver and Astoria in the 19th century. Each chapter focuses on one of these geographic areas.

To support his argument, Alessi created a six stage model of development based on Richard C. Wade’s The Urban Frontier (1959), Kenneth Lewis’ The American Frontier (1984), Francis Jennings’ The Invasion of American (1975), and Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991). Settling the Frontier synthesizes these older models of development and focuses only on the first two stages. Alessi does this to correct the Eurocentric lens of previous development models and highlight the important role Native Americans played in the development of the American frontier. The first stage describes Native American settlements and “cultural features,” while the second stage describes Native and Euroamerican interaction that resulted in the establishment of permanent Euroamerican “frontier” settlements. Alessi acknowledges that “many in-depth studies exist on North American Indians” but states that his work views Native Americans in a broader sense “by placing them within a sociological framework of civilizations that classifies them as being preindustrial peoples who built settlements with complex political, economic, and social institutions.” Additionally, Alessi seeks to address the idea that ethnographic history and Native cultural studies “fail to answer the more weighty issues of American history” and, based on the claims of historian Eugene Genovese, that scholars of Native history “fail at best and refuse at worst to attempt to answer the more profound questions of history.”

The chapter on the establishment of Fort Orange, Rensselaerswyck, and New Amsterdam covers the time period from 1609-1664. Alessi argues that the Mohawk and Mahican fur trade provided the incentive for the Dutch to establish permanent settlements in what would become New York. The chapter is divided into three phases: the exploration phase (1609-1614) chronicling Henry Hudson’s voyage and early Dutch interaction with Native Americans, the trading phase (1614-1623) which was marked by “sporadic activities of independent merchants” supported by the Mohawk and Mahican who used trade with the Dutch to gain an economic and political advantage over the Hurons and Algonquians, and the settlement phase (1624-1664). In this phase, Alessi focuses most closely on the period between 1624 and 1650 when the Mohawk created an economic and political environment that allowed the Dutch to safely establish permanent settlements without severe interference from other European powers or “hostile Indians.” Alessi states that despite the differences between the settlement of what would become New York and the other geographic areas studied in the book, the result was the same in that Euroamericans established permanent settlements.

By examining four instances of Euroamerican settlement across time and space, Alessi uncovers many similarities in settlement even with such vast geographic and temporal differences. He contends that all Euroamerican settlements on the frontier were middle ground in nature and “took place in borderland settings.” He argues that the motive for Euroamerican settlement was almost always economic and that the frontier was hostile to Euroamericans. Additionally, Alessi claims that the process of Euroamerican settlement began with the establishment of Native settlements and ended with the establishment of Euroamerican towns, and that the location of Native settlements determined where Euroamericans built their settlements. Lastly and “most importantly, though often resistant to Euroamerican progress or abused by it, Indians played an integral part in the development of the United States by motivating and assisting with the establishment of frontier towns from New Mexico to New York, the towns that became the logistical spearheads for the development of North America.”

Settling the Frontier is out of step with recent historiography and reminiscent of older scholarship. While Alessi recognizes that it is “a politically charged issue,” he chooses to use the term “Indian” instead of the term “Native American,” which he calls “cumbersome.” A few dated statements in the introduction compound the issues with terminology. This book will be of interest to those who seek to understand the process of Euroamerican colonization from a Euroamerican perspective.

Elana Krischer holds a PhD in History from the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research interests include 19th-century Native American history, settler colonialism, and historical geography.