A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Mätis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737-1832

In A Gathering of Rivers, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy traces the histories of Indian, multiracial, and mining communities in the western Great Lakes region during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For a century the Winnebagos (Ho-Chunks), Mesquakies (Fox), and Sauks successfully confronted waves of French and British immigration by diversifying their economies and commercializing lead mining. The success of the Native communities prompts important questions: What strategies did they devise to accommodate the newcomers? Why and how did very different cultures forge stable communities and working relationships? And what led to the conflicts that shattered this syncretic frontier world?

Focusing upon personal stories and detailed community histories, Murphy charts the changing economic forces at work in the region, connecting them to shifts in gender roles and intercultural relationships. She argues that French, British, and Native peoples forged a social and economic syncretism expressed partly by mixed-race marriages and the emergence of multiethnic communities at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. Significantly, Native peoples in the western Great Lakes region were able to adapt successfully to the new frontier market economy until their Native-controlled lead mining operations became the envy of outsiders who forced their way into the region during the 1820s. Murphy examines the creation of the mining and settler communities and the breakdown of their relations with Indian people.