Review: 'Born of Lakes and Plains,' by Anne F. Hyde

Like any chronicle of widespread migration across a continent, the history of the American West is a story about mixing cultures, languages and peoples. Beginning with the first French and English explorers, whenever whites encountered Native peoples, they fought, they traded goods, and inevitably they intermarried.

Anne F. Hyde's "Born of Lakes and Plains" seeks to bring this legacy of families sharing white and Native blood out of the shadows of our historical understanding. At certain times and places, intermarriage was a common practice. Native people simply extended this time-honored tool of diplomacy and trade — between, say, Ojibwe and Menominee — to whites.

Among Native peoples, marriage was often considered a temporary alliance, and polygamy accepted. Likewise, French fur traders seeking commercial contacts would claim a Native "country wife" on the frontier in addition to the femme back in Montreal. Their offspring faced uncertain futures, either as Natives or, less likely, as whites. Straddling cultures, they often served precarious roles as interpreters and go-betweens.

Hyde tries to corral her unwieldy narrative into the stories of five white men and their extended families ranging across North America from colonial times into the 20^th century. (Intermarriage between white women and Native men was rare.)

William Bent, for example, married Mistanta, daughter of a Cheyenne clan leader, and built a successful trading post on the Arkansas River early in the 19^th century. In keeping with Cheyenne custom, he also wed her two sisters and had children with all of them. One relative, George Bent, "began the [Civil War] as a white man but ended it as an Indian."

After serving in the Confederate Army, he joined with Black Kettle's Cheyenne band, who, despite surrendering, were massacred at Sand Creek in 1864. George survived only by hiding under a pile of bodies.

In the Northwest, fur entrepreneur Alexander McKay sired half-Chinook children by three wives. At the end of the 19^th century, his grandson, William Cameron McKay, a physician, was barred from voting because he was considered 9/16ths Native and therefore not a citizen. Never mind that he had previously been elected to a local government position.

Henry Schoolcraft emerges as Hyde's villain. His wife Jane, half-Ojibwe, tried to adapt to white culture while keeping close ties to her Ojibwe roots. It was harder to remain close to Henry, who often went off on speaking tours, posing as an expert on Native peoples, while dismissing them as incapable of complex thought.

Unfortunately, as Hyde jumps from one large extended family to another, it's impossible to keep the names straight, let alone discern what makes any of them tick. In the effort to convey the wide variety of fates encountered by mixed-descent people, she has offered a huge, and hugely confusing, cast of characters. Family tree charts would have been a help.

By the age of reservations, mixed-descent people were forced to identify with one culture or the other. Both was not an option. Being called "mixed" was nothing but a slur.

Dan Cryer is the author of "Being Alive and Having to Die: The Spiritual Odyssey of Forrest Church."

Born of Lakes and Plains

By: Anne F. Hyde.

Publisher: W.W. Norton, 442 pages, $40.