Conflict on the Michigan Frontier: Yankee and Borderland Cultures, 1815-1840. By James Z. Schwartz. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. viii, 184 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-87580-400-2.)

James Z. Schwartz's Conflict on the Michigan Frontier examines how Michigan's society was shaped by settlers from the East responding to the frontier and its borderland cultures. Newcomers to Michigan found the frontier's blended culture distasteful and sought to restrain and re-create a familiar eastern society. To this end, Schwartz argues, the newcomers erected legal and social boundaries to create their civilized society. While they alleviated some of the frontier's perceived lawlessness and savagery, the newcomers failed; instead, a new culture emerged that was a hybrid blend of the “civilized” East and the frontier. Schwartz relies heavily on newspapers to illustrate the shock and displeasure as well as the efforts to reform the savage and lawless nature of frontier society. The examples and arguments based on those newspaper articles draw the reader into the period while ably reinforcing the author's main point concerning Yankee perceptions of borderland culture. The taming of the Indians and the civilizing of the earlier white settlers (French and English/American traders) are the fulcrum of the monograph. Laws were passed to limit settler contact with Indians and to remove Native Americans from Michigan in an effort to limit their negative influence on settlers. Newspapers reinforced racial boundaries by printing and reprinting actual and fictional captivity narratives that emphasized the incompatibility of Indian and Anglo cultures. To civilize settlers, laws were created to purge society of vice—gambling, drinking, prostitution—while papers printed stories aimed at creating a virtuous readership through lessons on morality, family, and gender roles. The campaigns to civilize settlers while curbing drunkenness and creating a new ideal of fatherhood led to an increase in the number of educated women who refused to conform to traditional roles. In the end, Schwartz shows that legal and societal efforts were only partially effective and occasionally operated at cross purposes—Indians remained in Michigan, whites continued to socialize with them, and gambling, drinking, and prostitution continued apace.

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