Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier

Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier. By David Andrew Nichols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. xiv, 291 pp. $39.50, isbn 978-0-81392768-8.)

In the more than forty years since Reginald Horsman published his small but influential Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812 (1967), studies of Indian-white relations between the American Revolution and the War of 1812 have increased steadily. In the last few years alone, several books on the era have posed new questions, offered new interpretations, and emphasized the cultural complexities of the frontier. Red Gentlemen and White Savages is in good company, but it also makes a unique contribution.

Refuting old stereotypes, the past generation of scholarship has demonstrated that, rather than respond en masse to U.S. Indian policy, Indian peoples pursued differing and...