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Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West
Maybe someday
46
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
56/100Critics
36/100Scholars
Author:
Anne F. Hyde
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
February 15, 2022
Born of Lakes and Plains follows five mixed-descent families whose lives intertwined major events: imperial battles over the fur trade; the first extensions of American authority west of the Appalachians; the ravages of imported disease; the violence of Indian removal; encroaching American settlement; and, following the Civil War, the disasters of Indian war, reservations policy, and allotment.
What The Reviewers Say
Anne F. Hyde examines family life in the borderlands; her carefully wrought portrait of five families reveals the peculiar challenges faced by these quintessential people of the border.
Hyde tries to corral her unwieldy narrative into the stories of five white men and their extended families ranging across North America from colonial times into the 20th century.
Hyde doesn’t gloss over suffering. But in her immersive and humane new book she draws attention to the relationships between white and Indigenous people that made 'strangers into kin,' long before such unions were decried and, in some states, outlawed.
A fascinating history.
