Throughout the mid-1800s, outsiders, including many Euro-Americans, arrived in what is now northwest Washington. As they interacted with Samish, Lummi, S’Klallam, Sto:lo, and other groups, some of the men sought relationships with young local women. Hoping to establish mutually beneficial ties, Coast and Interior Salish families arranged strategic cross-cultural marriages. Some pairs became lifelong partners while other unions were short. These were crucial alliances that played a critical role in regional settlement and spared Puget Sound’s upper corner from the tragic conflicts other regions experienced. Accounts of the men, who often held public positions--army officer, Territorial Supreme Court justice, school superintendent, sheriff--exist in a variety of records. Some, like the nephew of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, were from prominent eastern families. Yet across the West, the contributions of their native wives remain unacknowledged. The women’s lives were marked by hardships and heartbreaks common for the time, but the four profiled--Caroline Davis Kavanaugh, Mary Fitzhugh Lear Phillips, Clara Tennant Selhameten, and Nellie Carr Lane--exhibited exceptional endurance, strength, and adaptability. Far from helpless victims, they influenced their husbands and controlled their homes. Remembered as loving mothers and good neighbors, they ran farms, nursed and supported family, served as midwives, and operated businesses. They visited relatives and attended ancestral gatherings, often with their children. Each woman’s story is uniquely hers, but together they and other intermarried women helped found Puget Sound communities and left lasting legacies. They were peace weavers. Author Candace Wellman hopes to shatter stereotypes surrounding these relationships. Numerous collaborators across the United States and Canada--descendants, local historians, academics, and more--graciously participated in her seventeen-year effort.

The story of Lopez Island is a story of community. Skilled, brave, generous people like Sampson Chadwick, Mother Brown, Captain Barlow, and Amelia Davis carved a spirited, nurturing community out of seaside wilderness. Homesteaders cleared forests, built farms, grew food, and raised large families, surviving then thriving together. The hamlets of Port Stanley, Richardson, and Lopez emerged, creating hubs with stores, post offices, and schools as well as thriving fishing, canning, and shipping industries. The community fostered education, music, writing, dances, chivarees, baseball, quilting, a birthday club, and grand Fourth of July celebrations. Living self-reliant lives while helping friends, neighbors, and newcomers, Lopezians created a unique community character that abides today.

This volume brings together an impressive collection of important works covering nearly every aspect of early Native American history, from contact and exchange to diplomacy, religion, warfare, and disease.

The Canadian West and the American Northwest offer a valuable setting for considering issues of borders and borderlands. The regions contain certain similarities, and during the first half of the nineteenth century they were even grouped together as a distinct political and economic unit, called the "Oregon Country" by Americans and the "Columbia Department" of the Hudson's Bay Company by the British. The essays in this volume -- which grew out of a conference commemorating the Oregon Treaty of 1846 -- view the boundary between Canada and the United States as a dividing line and also as a regional backbone, with people on each side of the border having key experiences and attitudes in common. In their eloquence and scope, they illustrate how historical study of Canadian-American relations in the West calls into question the parameters of the nation-state. The border has not had a single constant meaning; rather, its significance has changed over time and varied from group to group. The essays in Part One concern the movement of peoples and capital across a relatively permeable boundary during the nineteenth century. Many people in this era--especially Natives, miners, immigrants, and capitalists--did not regard the international boundary as particularly important. Part Two considers how the United States and Canada took pains to strengthen and enforce the international boundary during the twentieth century. In this era, the nation-state became more assertive about defining and defending the borderline. Part Three offers considerations of the distinctions, both real and imagined, that emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between Canada and the United States. Its essays examine different schools of history, divergent ideas toward wilderness, and the influence of anti-Americanism on Canadians' view of national development in North America.

For over three hundred years, the Indian peoples of North America have attracted the interest of diverse segments of German society?missionaries, writers, playwrights, anthropologists, filmmakers, hobbyists and enthusiasts, and even royalty. Today, German scholars continue to be drawn to Indians, as is the German public: tour groups from Germany frequent Plains reservations in the summer, and so-called Indianerclubs, where participants dress up in "authentic" Indian costume, are common. In this fascinating volume, scholars and writers illuminate the longstanding connection between Germans and the Indians. From a range of disciplines and occupations, the contributors probe the historical and cultural roots of the interactions between Germans and Indians and examine how such encounters have been represented in different media over the centuries. Particularly important are reflections and insights by modern Native American writers on this relationship. Of special concern is why such a connection has endured. As the contributors make clear, the encounters between Germans and Indians were also imagined, sometimes as fantasy, sometimes as projection, both resonating deeply with the cultural sensibilities and changing historical circumstances of Germans over the years.

In mythic sagas of the American West, the wide western range offers boundless opportunity to profile a limited cast of white men. In this pathbreaking anthology, Jameson and Armitage brings together 29 essays which present the story of women from that era. Clearly written and accessible, "Writing the Range" makes a major contribution to ethnic history, women's history, and interpretations of the American West. 27 illustrations. 3 maps.