John William Nelson is Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University. This interview is based on his new book, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
JF: What led you to write Muddy Ground?
JWN: The simple answer is to say that Muddy Ground grew out of my dissertation project, but really it goes much deeper than that. I grew up in Ohio, just south of the Great Lakes, and we spent summers up in Ontario, Canada with my grandparents where I became enthralled at a young age with all things fishing, canoeing, and camping. The real fascination for me was the portaging—the idea that I could (with the help of my siblings and dad) carry our canoe from our lake full of cottages to the next lake, and the next, until we got into truly remote territory—that excited me. I went on several epic and somewhat half-planned backcountry trips with my dad, brother, and sisters growing up that really helped me fall in love with canoe-camping. This lifelong fixation on canoeing and portaging eventually dovetailed with my other interests in history, and a good book project was born out of it. I wanted to explore the idea of portaging in its Indigenous and historical context, thinking about how the waterborne geography of North America facilitated and challenged the process of colonization. First, I wanted to write about all the portages of the Great Lakes watershed—a sort of network study of this Indigenous maritime world deep within the interior of the continent. But my advisor in graduate school wisely suggested I tailor it down to one significant portage, to make the project achievable. I eventually settled on Chicago as a key carrying place where Indigenous and European people portaged over a low continental divide to connect the Great Lakes watershed with the Mississippi Drainage. Chicago had not really factored into many academic histories of the region during the colonial era (because Europeans struggled for so long to master it) and that seemed like a good place to start my exploration of portages and Indigenous waterborne power.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Muddy Ground?
JWN: In Muddy Ground, I argue that the specific geographies of contact matter to the story of cross-cultural interaction, shaping the power dynamics of colonization in North America. To do that, I look at how control over Chicago’s portage fluctuated for several centuries between Indigenous groups, who generally understood the waterborne mobility of the Great Lakes region, and Europeans, who struggled to master the amphibious space of Chicago until the nineteenth century.
JF: Why do we need to read Muddy Ground?
JWN: Like I mentioned above, early Chicago has not factored much into the histories of Colonial North America or the early Great Lakes borderlands. It remained a space dominated by Native people and Native power dynamics for so long that it tends to get short shrift in the archival sources and by extension, many secondary history books. Muddy Ground helps recover a story about how Native peoples in the Great Lakes harnessed their unique freshwater geography and ecological knowledge to build power and mobility in the borderlands of North America. This view from the waterline of Chicago also serves as a sort of continental, Indigenous counterpoint to the good work that has been done on the Atlantic world and maritime networks in colonial context. Essentially, at Chicago, we see a freshwater, Indigenous waterborne world that rivaled, and for a long time, challenged the more familiar power dynamics of an imperial Atlantic world.
The story of how this Indigenous center of power gave way to U.S. conquest after such a long time also tells us something new about American expansion and U.S. history. Historians have struggled to explain why so many parts of North America stymied French and British control, but somehow gave way to American power in the nineteenth century. Muddy Ground helps to answer that question at Chicago with an oft-ignored explanation—the geography itself helps explain Indigenous power at Chicago, and when the United States successfully conquered Chicago in the nineteenth century, that can be explained by geographical changes as well. It was only after a series of internal improvements, or infrastructure projects, such as canal digging, plat surveys, bridge and harbor improvements, and wetlands drainages that Americans were able to rewrite the landscape of Chicago, undercut Indigenous power there, and bring this amphibious space under U.S. control. As I argue in the book, Chicago provides a particularly compelling example of this type of two-pronged conquest, but it helps us to understand how U.S. expansion played out across the entire continent as the American settler state rendered Indigenous places into new spaces of U.S. control.
JF: Why and when did you become an American historian?
JWN: I think I have wanted to be an American historian since my dad told me stories of Ohio’s frontier past while sitting on a stump in our woods back when I was a child, but my real development into a historian began in earnest when I was an undergraduate at Gettysburg College. I majored in history and international affairs, but it was through a few key mentors in the history department that I truly began to consider a career in history. My advisors and professors there helped me to see how history, when you boil it down, is not simply the memorization of names, dates, battles, or maps, but rather, it is the study of human nature that you can trace over time. You get the good, the bad, and the ugly of the human condition by studying the past, and that seemed like a pursuit worth dedicating a career to. I went on to the University of Notre Dame for graduate school, where I continued to hone my skills as a student of history, and pursued a dissertation that would get me back to my favorite field of history—the frontiers and borderlands of North America. Since then, I’ve never looked back and I am gratified to say that I’ve been able to live my dream in studying history for a living, and now, as a professor, I get to pay back some of that inspiration that my undergraduate mentors gave to me in my own classrooms. I love teaching history to students at all levels and it is what continues to motivate me as a historian today.
JF: What is your next project?
JWN: I’m tentatively calling my next project A Renegades’ History of the American Revolution and it will be a close study of several key individuals on the Revolutionary frontier who defied expectations and crossed sides during the conflict, to ally themselves with Native peoples rather than their fellow frontier residents. The study will dig into the lives of these “renegades” (as they were called at the time) to try to understand their motivations for crossing the cultural divide and fighting alongside Indigenous kin and allies during and after the Revolution. While fleshing out the complex motivations of these individuals, I’m hoping to make a larger point about the contingency of frontier loyalties, identities, and racial attitudes during the early years of our American nation. The fact that a significant minority of frontier folk rejected the hardening racial divisions between American society and Native communities seems like a substantial caveat to narratives that cast the Revolutionary War in the west as essentially a race war to eradicate Native peoples from the region. As the presence of these renegades shows, loyalties in the borderlands of revolution remained more complicated and messier, and not everyone in frontier society aspired to a world where their Indigenous neighbors would be defeated or removed. These renegades fought to maintain an intercultural world that included both colonists and Native peoples, and my project will try to understand the motives behind that, especially during an era where racial divides were becoming more entrenched through national policies, warfare, and Indigenous dispossession.
JF: Thanks, John!