Echoes From A Distant Frontier

Echoes from a Distant Frontier is an edited, annotated selection of the correspondence of Corinna and Ellen Brown, two single women in their twenties, who left a comfortable New England home in 1835 for the Florida frontier. Within a month of their arrival, the frontier erupted in Indian war. The Browns witnessed the terror and carnage firsthand, and their letters paint a vivid picture of the Second Seminole War (1835-1842).

Sounding 4 begins with the first narrative of squatter George Russell followed by an echo on magistrate, soldier and later Crown Lands Commissioner for the Western District ‘Flogger’ Fyans. Expansion west and north-west from Geelong soon causes the Colac tribal collapse and later the government-sanctioned revenge massacre of the Gadubanud Cape Otway clans. Then follows the dispossession timeline of the Geelong / Ballarat Wathaurong people and the extensive contributions by Ian D Smith on Aboriginal geography and languages of the west, with clan organization, mechanisms of dispossession, Aboriginal responses, a geography of disruption and Aboriginal perceptions of Europeans in 19th century Victoria. For contrast is a section SANITIZED ‘FRONTIER’ PROFILES OF PROMINENT COLONIALS controlling the countryside until largely replaced by the bankers and gold-diggers. Moving further west is an echo titled WINNING & LOSING THE GRAMPIANS AND THE GLENELG RIVER before a complete reproduction of Dr Jan Critchett’s Distant Field of Murder. Ian Clark and George Russell reveal how the western plains were taken over after the ‘vanishing’ of the Djab Wurrung clans around the Hopkins River. Echoes of the KULIN SUNSET COUNTRY SETTLED and A SCOTTISH ARK GROUNDS AT ARARAT are settler versions largely from local history books of reminiscences by successful sheep and cattle pastoralists such as the Learmonth and Russell family dynasties. The sour joke that the Scots had the land, the Irish the pubs and the English the accent, does no justice to the role of guns, germs and money-making… Modern scholarship birthed echoes titled FRONTIER MAYHEM IN THE FAR WEST which include the tribal resistance of Jupiter, Cocknose, Roger, Doctor, Bumbletoe etc. defeated by the likes of Wathaurong guide Bon Jon with CCL Fyans and the mounted Wurundjeri and Bunurong members of Captain Dana’s Native Police. This is followed by Marie Fels on native police action and A. G. L. Shaw on frontier violence, with Dr Critchett’ overview on Framlingham Aboriginal Mission Station. Sounding 4 concludes with aftermath echoes titled KING DAVID, DAWSON’S INFORMANTS & THE CAMPERDOWN GEORGE OBELISK and echo 74: HINDSIGHTS ON THE CULTURE-CLASH FRONTIER. Part 1 of which is on Redmond Barry, terra nullius and the Bon Jon case and part 2 has historian Henry Reynolds challenging our national self-image.

In The Threshold of Manifest Destiny, Laurel Clark Shire illuminates the vital role women played in national expansion and shows how gender ideology was a key mechanism in U.S. settler colonialism. Among the many contentious frontier zones in nineteenth-century North America, Florida was an early and important borderland where the United States worked out how it would colonize new territories. From 1821, when it acquired Florida from Spain, through the Second Seminole War, and into the 1850s, the federal government relied on women's physical labor to create homes, farms, families, and communities. It also capitalized on the symbolism of white women's presence on the frontier; images of imperiled women presented settlement as the spread of domesticity and civilization and rationalized the violence of territorial expansion as the protection of women and families. Through careful parsing of previously unexplored military, court, and land records, as well as popular culture sources and native oral tradition, Shire tracks the diverse effects of settler colonialism on free and enslaved blacks and Seminole families. She demonstrates that land-grant policies and innovations in women's property law implemented in Florida had long-lasting effects on American expansion. Ideologically, the frontier in Florida laid the groundwork for Manifest Destiny, while, practically, the Armed Occupation Act of 1842 presaged the Homestead Act.

In 1840, twenty-three-year-old George Long Brown migrated from New Hampshire to north Florida, a region just emerging from the devastating effects of the Second Seminole War. This volume presents over seventy of Brown’s previously unpublished letters to illuminate day-to-day life in pre–Civil War Florida. Brown’s personal and business correspondence narrates his daily activities and his views on politics, labor practices, slavery, fundamentalist religion, and local gossip. Having founded a successful mercantile establishment in Newnansville, Brown traveled the region as far as Savannah and Charleston, purchasing goods from plantations and strengthening social and economic ties in two of the region’s most developed cities. In the decade leading up to the Civil War, Brown married into one of the largest slaveholding families in the area and became involved in the slave trade. He also bartered with locals and mingled with the judges, lawyers, and politicians of Alachua County. The Letters of George Long Brown provides an important eyewitness view of north Florida’s transformation from a subsistence and herding community to a market economy based on cotton, timber, and other crops, showing that these changes came about in part due to an increased reliance on slavery. Brown’s letters offer the first social and economic history of one of the most important yet little-known frontiers in the antebellum South. A volume in the series Contested Boundaries, edited by Gene Allen Smith

This volume contains a variety of essays about Florida literature and history by scholars from across the state representing every kind of institution of higher learning, from community colleges to small liberal arts institutions to large universities. The essays in the first section, “Florida Studies”, focus on the rich literary, historical, and cultural traditions of the region. The contributions in “Literary and Cultural Studies” offer readings and analyses of diverse texts and critical lenses. The final section, Pedagogy, explores strategies for and challenges within institutions of higher learning in Florida.

The first book to tell the tale of the War of 1812 from the privateers’ perspective. Winner of the John Lyman Book Award of the North American Society for Oceanic History During the War of 1812, most clashes on the high seas involved privately owned merchant ships, not official naval vessels. Licensed by their home governments and considered key weapons of maritime warfare, these ships were authorized to attack and seize enemy traders. Once the prizes were legally condemned by a prize court, the privateers could sell off ships and cargo and pocket the proceeds. Because only a handful of ship-to-ship engagements occurred between the Royal Navy and the United States Navy, it was really the privateers who fought—and won—the war at sea. In Privateering, Faye M. Kert introduces readers to U.S. and Atlantic Canadian privateers who sailed those skirmishing ships, describing both the rare captains who made money and the more common ones who lost it. Some privateers survived numerous engagements and returned to their pre-war lives; others perished under violent circumstances. Kert demonstrates how the romantic image of pirates and privateers came to obscure the dangerous and bloody reality of private armed warfare. Building on two decades of research, Privateering places the story of private armed warfare within the overall context of the War of 1812. Kert highlights the economic, strategic, social, and political impact of privateering on both sides and explains why its toll on normal shipping helped convince the British that the war had grown too costly. Fascinating, unfamiliar, and full of surprises, this book will appeal to historians and general readers alike.

Sounding 6 begins with Bain Attwood’s thesis Blacks & Lohans and an echo titled SEX & SORROW EAST OF MELBOURNE. Then Henry Meyrick’s frontier life and death in Western Port and Gipps Land leads into Echo 93: TAMING MELBOURNE BAYSIDE & THE DANDENONGS. Turning to OPENING GIPPSLAND: elite squatters at Sale are contrasted by surviving Kooris on Jackson’s Track. The narrative then backtracks in time with Echo 95: CONTRIBUTIONS TO TRUTH ABOUT SLAUGHTER IN GIPPSLAND comprising the Porter, Cox, Fels and Gardner versions of the blood-stained land-grab. Fels then reports on the Native Police actions and Morgan’s recent overview of the Ganai before and after white settlement concludes the shameful issues long denied or excused. Echo 96: LIAR’S LUNCH charts the rise and fall of pioneer Angus McMillan MP before the focus shifts to the historical geography of East Gippsland clans and languages and on to missionary Bulmer at Lake Tyers with the stories of the payback of Hopping Kitty and Attwood’s study of Brataualung man Tarra Bobby. Alfred Howitt’s birthing of Oz anthropology with his opus The Native Tribes of South-east Australia published at the start of the 20th century is the source material of several echoes on the making of ‘clever’ men and on songs and song-makers. Sounding 6 closes with extracts reprinted from Professor Elkin’s Aboriginal Men of High Degree – their personality and ‘making’, the powers of medicine men, and in conclusion Echo 106: ABORIGINAL MEN OF HIGH DEGREE IN A CHANGING WORLD.

The first full-length biography of the well-connected, but nearly forgotten frontier politician of antebellum America. The scion of a well-to-do Richmond, Virginia, family, William Pope DuVal (1784–1854) migrated to the Kentucky frontier as a youth in 1800. Settling in Bardstown, DuVal read law, served in Congress, and fought in the War of 1812. In 1822, largely because of the influence of his lifelong friend John C. Calhoun, President James Monroe appointed DuVal the first civil governor of the newly acquired Territory of Florida. Enjoying successive appointments from the Adams and Jackson administrations, DuVal founded Tallahassee and presided over the territory’s first twelve territorial legislative sessions, years that witnessed Middle Florida’s development into one of the Old Southwest’s most prosperous slave-based economies. Beginning with his personal confrontation with Miccosukee chief Neamathla in 1824 (an episode commemorated by Washington Irving), DuVal worked closely with Washington officials and oversaw the initial negotiations with the Seminoles. A perennial political appointee, DuVal was closely linked to national and territorial politics in antebellum America. Like other “Calhounites” who supported Andrew Jackson’s rise to the White House, DuVal became a casualty of the Peggy Eaton Affair and the Nullification Crisis. In fact he was replaced as Florida governor by Mrs. Eaton’s husband, John Eaton. After leaving the governor’s chair, DuVal migrated to Kentucky, lent his efforts to the cause of Texas Independence, and eventually returned to practice law and local politics in Florida. Throughout his career DuVal cultivated the arts of oratory and story-telling—skills essential to success in the courtrooms and free-for-all politics of the American South. Part frontiersman and part sophisticate, DuVal was at home in the wilds of Kentucky, Florida, Texas, and Washington City. He delighted in telling tall tales, jests, and anecdotes that epitomized America’s expansive, democratic vistas. Among those captivated by DuVal’s life and yarns were Washington Irving, who used DuVal’s tall tales as inspiration for his “The Early Experiences of Ralph Ringwood,” and James Kirke Paulding, whose “Nimrod Wildfire” shared Du Val’s brashness and bonhomie. “In large brushstrokes, but with great attention to detail, Denham embeds DuVal’s life in a wider portrait of the young Republic, and particularly in issues affecting the western states and the former Spanish borderlands Readers will find in this book a well-researched and well-written history that informs on many levels.” —The Historian “Relying on a variety of sources extending well beyond DuVal’s papers, Denham’s work provides an intriguing account of a southerner immersed in the dynamics of politics at both the local and national levels. The study will be a definitive must for any student of antebellum regional and national history.” —The Journal of Southern History