Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley.

Larson, John L.

Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley, by Elizabeth A. Perkins. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 253 pp. $71.95 Cdn (cloth), $28.75 Cdn (paper).

What was it really like in the American borderlands in the era of the Revolution? Ever since Frederick Jackson Turner penned his evocative (and largely mythical) portrait of the transformative frontier experience, historians have sought evermore accurate and ordinary images of the lives of the pioneers and their adversaries on the "middle ground." Travelers' narratives and the eyewitness reports of better-educated government officials, religious missionaries, and upper-class settlers have been mined relentlessly for details; but by definition these literate, self-conscious reporters lacked access to the genuine experience of common pioneers. They did not easily capture (or even perceive) the ignorance, fears, superstitions, hatreds, hopes, and dreams of the people who habitually trespassed on Indian lands, flouted or ignored the restrictions of government, took extraordinary chances in what seems like an irrational campaign to avoid the routine obligations of community life, and in the process "won the West" for the new United States.

Elizabeth Perkins's Border Life tackles an underused source and opens a new window of observation into the lives of the pioneers. Approaching her subject with the mind of an ethnographer, Perkins explores the notebooks of John Dabney Shane, a Presbyterian clergyman who spent much of the 1840s and 1850s touring the wilds of Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois interviewing surviving old settlers whose memories constituted oral histories of the pioneer experience. Shane's transcriptions now rest in the Draper Collection at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, where Perkins has examined them as field notes of a modern anthropologist.

The results of Perkins's effort is an immensely readable and compelling volume that ignores (thankfully) the heroic conquest narratives that traditionally shaped frontier history and recovers something of the indeterminacy or incoherence of real memoirs. In Shane's collected interviews, private fragments of memory competed with community history (represented, for example, by dates and Indian wars), the present perspectives of respondents, and the psychological needs of old age, all trying to impose importance on lives approaching completion. Shane's role as collector further mediates these memories in ways Perkins tries to expose. The fruit of her efforts, like the fruit of any ethnography or oral history, is rich with vivid images, nuggets of insight, mood, taste -- the sensory elements that disappear so quickly in formal prose narration.

Perkins's chapters seem loosely organized around thematic questions: What did pioneers know about the West? How did they view the country? What distinctions did they recognize among themselves? How was political power distributed? How did they reconcile themselves in time? History, historiography, and primary source material interact, sometimes seamlessly, to inform Perkins's paragraphs, giving rise to an authorial voice that is very smooth and reassuring. In fact, one of the strengths of this book is its confident (but not contentious) treatment of an elusive subject. In appendices she lists the interviews contained in Shane's collection and reproduces one entire record as an example. Extensive notes and a lengthy bibliography (not to mention a striking design) complete a useful and attractive publishing package.

All that said, it remains a bit unclear just what we learn anew from Perkins's exploitation of the Shane notebooks. Perkins acknowledges the obvious problems with these old-age reminiscences, mediated as they are through a Jacksonian-era scribe with his own agenda, but she never systematically works through what to do about those problems. We see surprisingly little of the source material itself: what comes through are snippets selected after Perkins has immersed herself in the whole and brought to bear the weight of her own understanding of the time, place, and history of the Ohio Valley. Strict quantification would not really help, yet questions of proportion beg answers: How many pioneers remembered this feature, event, or experience? How often was this attitude expressed? Were similar examples from similar contexts? Were there corroborating witnesses? Did the stories check out? How much or little was this or that memory contaminated by the evolution of folk history in the fifty years separating event and interview? Perhaps most pressingly, how much of what Perkins finds in the sources inheres in the sources, and how much comes to the sources from her own erudite command of the literature?

These reservations invariably accompany the best oral history, ethnography, and cultural interpretation whenever the project calls for testimony from less articulate witnesses. Perkins's volume encounters the same perils that meet historians of African American slave life and values, of many wage laborers, Indians, women and children, deviants, and criminals. We seem to want to talk to exactly the people in the past that most scribes in the past found unworthy to record, and so we seek their voices by indirection. Perkins has produced an insightful account, and it remains for her readers to use it with appropriate caution.

John L. Larson Purdue University