Tells the story of Lionel and Barron Jacobs, Jewish merchants who started with a general store in Tucson in 1867 and went on to found Arizona's first bank.

Life on the frontier in the decades before the Revolution was extremely difficult and uncertain. It was a world populated by Native Americans, merchants, fur traders, land speculators, soldiers and settlers—including women, slaves, and indentured servants. Each of these groups depended on the others in some way, and collectively they formed the patchwork that was life on the frontier. Using a wealth of material culled from primary sources, Dunn paints a vivid picture of a world caught up in the winds of change, a world poised on the edge of revolution. Life on the frontier in the decades before the Revolution was extremely difficult and uncertain. It was a world populated by Indians, merchants, fur traders, land speculators, soldiers and settlers—including women, slaves, and indentured servants. Each of these groups depended on the others in some way, and collectively they formed the patchwork that was life on the frontier. Using a wealth of material culled from primary sources, Dunn paints a vivid picture of a world caught up in the winds of change, a world poised on the edge of revolution. In the 15 years preceding the American Revolution, the existence of the frontier exerted a dominant influence on the colonial economy. The possibility of new territory in the West and the removal of the French army offered an enormous opportunity for economic expansion but such prospects were not without risk. Farmers worked endlessly to clear a few scant acres for production. Traders struggled to reach remote areas to bargain with local tribes. Merchants weighted the possibilities for enormous profit with huge risk. Native Americans faced increasing encroachment upon their traditional lands. Women and slaves played a greater role in opening the frontier than many sources have indicated.

“A vivid panorama of the transitional years when Ohio evolved from a raw frontier territory to an established province of an ever-expanding nation.” —Booklist Nowhere on the American frontier was the clash of cultures more violent than on the Ohio frontier. First settled by migrating Native Americans about 1720 and later by white settlers, Ohio became the crucible which set indigenous and military policy throughout the region. There, Shawnees, Wyandots, and Delawares, among others, fought to preserve their land claims. A land of opportunity, refuge, and violence for both Native Americans and whites, Ohio served as the political, economic, and social foundation for the settlement of the Old Northwest. “Finally, after nearly twenty-five years, a high-quality general history of the frontier period of the state of Ohio . . . [A] dynamic account . . . that should delight both Transappalachian frontier scholars and interested amateurs.” —History “This exhaustively researched and well-written book provides a comprehensive history of Ohio from 1720 to 1830.” —Journal of the Early Republic

However, this is no romanticized saga. Town shows that the fur trade produced a peculiar cocktail of corporate manipulation, family ties, personal willfulness, political ineptitude, and frontier violence that led to one of the darkest periods of Canadian history. From 1811 when Lord Selkirk first brought his proposal to settle displaced Scots crofters in Rupert’s Land, to the merger of the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies in 1821, the fur trade was in the grip of turmoil. Although well-intentioned, Selkirk had already failed at several resettlement projects before he introduced the idea to the Hudson’s Bay Company ...

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Macau, New Orleans, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. All of these metropolitan centers were once frontier cities, urban areas irrevocably shaped by cross-cultural borderland beginnings. Spanning a wide range of periods and locations, and including stories of eighteenth-century Detroit, nineteenth-century Seattle, and twentieth-century Los Angeles, Frontier Cities recovers the history of these urban places and shows how, from the start, natives and newcomers alike shared streets, buildings, and interwoven lives. Not only do frontier cities embody the earliest matrix of the American urban experience; they also testify to the intersections of colonial, urban, western, and global history. The twelve essays in this collection paint compelling portraits of frontier cities and their inhabitants: the French traders who bypassed imperial regulations by throwing casks of brandy over the wall to Indian customers in eighteenth-century Montreal; Isaac Friedlander, San Francisco's "Grain King"; and Adrien de Pauger, who designed the Vieux Carré in New Orleans. Exploring the economic and political networks, imperial ambitions, and personal intimacies of frontier city development, this collection demonstrates that these cities followed no mythic line of settlement, nor did they move lockstep through a certain pace or pattern of evolution. An introduction puts the collection in historical context, and the epilogue ponders the future of frontier cities in the midst of contemporary globalization. With innovative concepts and a rich selection of maps and images, Frontier Cities imparts a crucial untold chapter in the construction of urban history and place.