Ryan Hall. Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 272 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-5515-4; (e-book), ISBN 978-1-4696-5516-1.
Reviewed by James Mochoruk (University of North Dakota)
Published on H-AmIndian (March, 2022)
Commissioned by F. Evan Nooe (University of South Carolina Lancaster)
Not to put too fine a point upon matters, Ryan Hall has crafted an astonishingly good book out of his 2015 Yale PhD dissertation. In only 180 pages of text, Beneath the Backbone of the World manages to tell the complex story of the three nations of the Blackfoot peoples, who dominated a sizable portion of the northwestern Great Plains, over a period of 150 years. In essence, this book is about the world that the Piikani, Kainai, and Siksika created for themselves and how they managed change during the fur trade era, all “while maintaining their own sovereignty, territory and peace of mind” (p. 3).
Hall breaks his work into three major parts: “Homelands, 1720-1806,” “Boundaries, 1806-1848,” and “Collisions, 1848-1870,” plus an epilogue that carries the story in Canada up to 1877. This division is a bit misleading though, as well over half of chapter one provides background on the origins, beliefs, cultural development, and political and diplomatic activities of the Blackfoot in the millennium prior to 1720, as well as vivid descriptions of the land, resources, and eco-regions of Blackfoot territory. But this is all to the good, particularly for nonspecialist readers, who will find this material particularly useful.
The remainder of this first chapter is dedicated to the changes that accompanied the arrival of two new factors which would greatly alter life on the Great Plains after 1720—metal trade goods arriving from the north and horses from the south. Hall carefully analyzes the impact of both upon the men and women of the Blackfoot nations, noting the positive aspects of metal kettles, awls, hatchets, and the like for domestic labor, as well as the use of horses for the largely gendered work of moving camp. Whereas most older works focus upon the utility of horses and metal trade goods (particularly iron arrowheads and other instruments useful for hunting bison and for warfare) for the men of the First Nations, Hall provides a far more balanced account. But, having said this, the author also provides a detailed analysis of the changes that were wrought in terms of horse raiding, the taking of captives in warfare, and the significant increase in Blackfoot power vis-à-vis their neighbors. All in all, by the 1770s, the Blackfoot were living in a new, horse-based world, one that was largely of their own making and in which they retained the territories and cultural autonomy that had been theirs since time immemorial.
As Hall points out in the following chapter, there was no direct contact between Europeans and the Blackfoot until 1754, and this was but a fleeting encounter with Anthony Henday, when representatives of the Blackfoot people declined Henday’s invitation to bring their furs north to Hudson Bay instead of trading through Cree and Assiniboine intermediaries. However, once the competitive period of the fur trade commenced in earnest and fur trade posts were established on the northern edges of Blackfoot territory (but not within it, owing to Blackfoot resistance), life changed yet again on the northwestern plains. Up until this point the Blackfoot had been reluctant to waste resources on purchasing secondhand trade guns when powder, shot, and repairs were almost impossible to access. But with the proliferation of North West Company and Hudson Bay Company trading posts on the northern edge of their territory and the greatly increased mobility of the Blackfoot owing to their acquisition of horses over the previous half century, it now made sense for the three nations to trade for guns. This provided the Blackfoot with a distinct advantage over their southern and western neighbors/rivals, and it became part of Blackfoot strategy to keep guns out of the hands of those rivals and to use these weapons to enhance their own power and prestige throughout the region—including the use of guns to engage in the increasingly important activity of horse raiding.
Of course, the arrival of whites in the vicinity also increased the possibility of exposure to disease, and in 1781 the Blackfoot experienced a devastating encounter with smallpox. With a mortality rate of perhaps 50 percent and their society in disarray, the Blackfoot people hovered on the edge of extinction, for their rivals—many of whom had already been exposed to European diseases and thus suffered fewer losses—might now be able to wipe them out. According to Hall, it was at this point that the Blackfoot went “all in” for the fur trade, seeing it as their surest method of survival. Because of their spiritual beliefs the Blackfoot peoples eschewed trapping beaver, so their primary trade good of the early fur trade era, wolf pelts, remained a staple. But this was added to by the trade in provisions—most notably pemmican and other bison-derived foodstuffs. It was on the basis of this trade that the Blackfoot rapidly built up their supply of guns, engaged in warfare (often for the purpose of taking women and children captives in order to rebuild their population), and even more horse raiding. So successful were they in these endeavors that white traders and trappers and rival native groups alike were kept out of their territories and the Blackfoot were the unquestioned masters of the northwestern plains by the turn of the nineteenth century.
In many ways the most interesting part of Hall’s analysis comes in part two, “Boundaries.” From the arrival of a fragment of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806 through to the late 1840s, Hall provides in-depth coverage of the Blackfoots’ always altering strategies, not just for survival but for success. Keenly aware of the threat posed to their predominance if rivals acquired more trade goods, the Blackfoot continually looked for ways to block their access to trading posts, to play rival fur trade companies off against each other, and eventually, to use the arrival of American-based traders as a counterbalance to their increasingly troubled relations with British and Canadian-based traders. Using a carefully calculated mix of violence, intimidation, and diplomacy (particularly the creation of new alliances), the Blackfoot were incredibly successful at protecting their position on the transnational plains. And even the devastation wrought by a second epidemic in 1837—when as much as two-thirds of the Blackfoot population perished and their rivals, the northern Plains Cree, stood poised to destroy them—could not end their determination to survive and prosper. Adapting to yet another set of changes, the Blackfoot focused their energies upon the new buffalo robe trade, and in less than a decade had reasserted their unquestioned mastery over their traditional territories.
However, as part 3, “Collisions,” documents, in the years from 1848 to 1870, the transition from “extractive colonialism” to “settler colonialism” would prove to be a challenge that confounded even the Blackfoot. Here Hall provides a detailed analysis of the efforts of the US government—in the person of Isaac Stevens—to establish a treaty that would open Blackfoot territory to free passage for white travelers, secure peaceful relations between the Blackfoot and native groups (including the Lakota) who were entering their territories to hunt the rapidly diminishing bison herds of the West, and in Stevens’s mind, to set the Blackfoot and other natives on a path to “civilization,” which would eventually open their territories to white settlement. Hall is particularly good at establishing the very different interpretations that the Blackfoot had of this treaty, which helps to explain why they were so outraged when the pace of white encroachment upon their territories began in earnest in the late 1850s.
As Hall makes clear, the arrival of the first steam-powered vessel into the heart of Blackfoot territory in the summer of 1859 was the harbinger of change that would witness the destruction of Blackfoot power, if not Blackfoot culture. Although that first vessel brought much-appreciated trade goods, annuity supplies, and materials for building a military road from Fort Benton to the headwaters of the Columbia River, subsequent boats would bring hordes of settlers, and after 1862, gold-seekers who had no intention of respecting Blackfoot lands. Even worse, the “Blackfoot Agency,” which had been established to protect the interests of the people, proved unwilling, unable, and uninterested in fulfilling even its most basic duties to the Blackfoot (such as dispensing annuity supplies). Add to this the disruption that the Civil War brought to the buffalo robe trade, the impact of the diminishing herds of buffalo upon Blackfoot food supplies, and then, in 1864-65, the arrival of another epidemic (the so-called black pox), and the Blackfoot found themselves at the center of a perfect storm.
Not surprisingly, as was happening in various parts of Minnesota and the West from 1862 onward, native desperation and frustration led to violence and raids upon white settlements, particularly among younger warriors. Sometimes fueled by the alcohol that was now so readily available but also by the violence which the white mining community indiscriminately directed toward the Blackfoot peoples, such conflict failed to be resolved through diplomacy. The old treaty of 1855 was allowed to expire and two attempts at negotiating a new agreement failed to be ratified in the late 1860s. It was during this period that the “medicine line” separating US and British territory took on a powerful new meaning for the Blackfoot, as the border now provided safe haven from US forces in the aftermath of raids and counter-raids.
Sadly, as Hall notes, the safe haven to which most of the Blackfoot peoples retreated after the massacre of the peaceful Heron Band in January of 1870 was far from perfect. The impact of American-based liquor dealers, the potential arrival of more settlers into the northern part of their territories, and rivalry with the Metis and others for the now almost completely vanished buffalo herds compelled the Blackfoot peoples north of the 49th Parallel to petition Ottawa for a treaty. And once again, the treaty process would be problematic and rife with misunderstandings.
However, for all of the sadness and loss that Hall documents in his final two chapters, he can say with some conviction that the Blackfoot story is remarkable—and one that is far from over. As he puts it, “the Blackfoot nations remain where they have always been, deep in the storied prairies beneath the Backbone of the World, [and that] is a profound testament to their resiliency and persistence in the face of colonial change” (p. 180).
Having said all of this, there are still a few key points that need to be made about Beneath the Backbone of the World. First, Hall has managed to bridge the gap between scholarly and popular writing. Not only does he provide context that will benefit both academic and popular audiences, but he has also adopted a useful stratagem in regard to matters of historiographical disagreement and use of sources. Hall does not burden the casual reader with lengthy discussions of the problematic nature of various primary sources—but for the scholarly reader, these discussions are carried on in extensive explanatory endnotes. And in much the same way, when Hall’s analysis challenges one or more secondary sources—as he does over the dating of the arrival of smallpox in Blackfoot territory, the timing of Blackfoot alliances with Cree and Assiniboine, and the impact of alcohol—he does not break up the flow of his narrative but explains his disagreement in the endnotes. It is also noteworthy that although Hall clearly admires and respects the Blackfoot peoples, he does not shy away from discussing the violence and internal divisions that sometimes erupted among them—and which earned them the reputation of being the most fearsome of all the Plains peoples, both among whites and many of their native rivals.
While all three parts of Hall’s work are extensively grounded in primary sources, the author is keenly aware of the inherent problem of using non-native sources to reconstruct the history of indigenous peoples. Thus, whenever possible Hall has not only “read beyond words” in the sources available in traditional archives but has also used as much as he could from the Blackfoot oral tradition and from the work of native scholars. But he has not ignored the works that came before his own. Thus, endnote readers will find Hall to be deeply engaged with the works of Hugh Dempsey (in many ways the dean of Blackfoot studies in Canada), John Ewers, George Colpitts, and a host of others.
At the end of the day, Hall has produced a landmark study of the Blackfoot, one that is easy to read, highly accessible, and yet thoroughly scholarly. As I said at the outset, this is an astonishingly good book.
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Citation:
James Mochoruk. Review of Hall, Ryan, Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877.
H-AmIndian, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57123
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |