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 Reviews Natives collectively categorized as “Iroquois.” Fur trade historians habitually accept Simpson ’s evaluation of Ross, but Reid disputes that interpretation. Instead, Reid argues, the fur trade’s hierarchical social structure, most effective at fixed trading posts, broke down in the Snake River Country, permitting unruly “Iroquois” and “freemen” to run rough-shod over Ross’s impotent complaints regarding his authority and his crew’s behavior. True, Simpson , Ogden, and Ross all bitterly reviled the “scum”in their employ, and low-end hirelings did sometimes run off, leaving uncollectable debts. But mixed-blood and Native trappers andhuntersworkedfor allof the fur companies in Oregon, as they had during two centuries of the North American fur trade, and it seems a stretch to lay Ross’s problems at their feet. Likewise,Reid argues that the visible markers that identified social standing at trading posts — where elites wore nicer clothing, consumed better food, and enjoyed more comfortable accommodations — could not be maintained in the backcountry, and thus hamstrung Ross’s ability to control and command his men. That interpretation is less than persuasive,considering that Smith remained a highly effective and admired leader even when he dressed in rags and starved just like his men. Perhaps Smith simply paid less heed to the social distinctions that marked British culture. Still, Smith and other Americans punished miscreants when feasible, and they certainly held their own against British competitors in the Oregon Country. Reid suggests that American interlopers did not travel “up the Missouri River into the Snake country”; instead, “the spearhead was . . . missionaries and farmers coming through South Pass along the Oregon Trail” (p. 203). What goes unmentioned is that the missionaries and farmers did nothing more than follow the Platte River Road developed by fur traders in the 1820s — the route was not called the“Oregon Trail”until 1840. It was not simply failures in leadership by HBC men that drove the British-Canadians north of the Columbia River; rather, it is more reasonable to argue that the sheer numbers of Americans going west after 1840 rendered the HBC’s “scorched earth” policy in the Snake River Country pointless and tipped the imperial balance in favor of the United States. Despite that apparent interpretive lapse, Reid has presented readers with a superbly researched and well-written narrative that sheds light on the intricacies of law and disorder in the early Oregon Country. Barton H. Barbour Boise State University Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885– 1928 by Andrea Geiger Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011. Illustrations, notes, index. 308 pages. $45.00 cloth. SubvertingExclusionisamodel of transnational history. By drawing on sources as diverse as Japanese language short stories, American popular magazines,and Canadian Royal Commissions , Andrea Geiger convincingly shows that Japanese immigrants to North America experienced white racism through a lens of historical Japanese concepts of mibun — that is, caste or status. A poem by an anonymous immigrant neatly summarizes the thesis: In Japan, I am an outcaste. In America, I am an outcaste called “Jap.” Geiger argues that while contesting the barriers imposed by the American and Canadian governments, the Japanese in the North AmericanWest created their own exclusionary categories by defining who “belonged,” thus demonstrating as “rhetoric” the claim that Nikkei communities were homogeneous.“The  OHQ vol. 113, no. 4 result,” she concludes, is a “more complex and dynamic process of negotiation and adaptation ” to North American conditions than can be comprehended by the “paradigms of heritage or assimilation” so common in immigration history (p. 14). Although the Meiji government in 1871 officially abolished formal status, the concept of buraku jūmin (or outcaste),though silenced, persisted. It could be acquired by criminal or immoralactivitiesorinherited,usuallythrough polluting occupations such as tanners, butchers , and in some areas, coal miners and fishers. Geiger suggests there may be a correlation between prefectures with the greatest number of emigrants and those with the most outcaste villages. The efforts of the Meiji government to combat racism by attempting to regulate the emigration of “low class” individuals and by asking North American governments to enforce immigration laws backfired and created conditions that affronted Japan’s national honor, allowed the United States and Canada “to...

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