Great Lakes Creoles is far more than a local study of Prairie du Chien as it transitioned from fur trade outpost to Wisconsin town. Although several works have addressed the marginalization of mixed-ancestry peoples in the American Southwest and in Canadian borderlands, Murphy is the first to examine the outcome of American expansion and settlement for the Francophone fur traders who settled in areas that eventually became the states of Wisconsin and Michigan. Her detailed case study of one of the most remote of these communities, Prairie du Chien, makes excellent use of territorial documents, court records, family histories, and genealogical information to demonstrate clearly that these Great Lakes Creoles, despite significant intermarriage with and descent from American Indian women, were able to avoid being defined as an ethnic out-group and instead were assimilated as white residents of the community by 1860. Murphy presents the stark contrast between the experience...
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Book Review|
April 01 2016
Great Lakes Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie du Chien, 1750–1860
Great Lakes Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie du Chien, 1750–1860
. By Murphy, Lucy Eldersveld. (New York
: Cambridge University Press
, 2014
. xvi + 313 pp., acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, index
. $32.99 paper.)Ethnohistory (2016) 63 (2): 419–420.
Citation
Cary Miller; Great Lakes Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie du Chien, 1750–1860. Ethnohistory 1 April 2016; 63 (2): 419–420. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-3455411
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