Exploring our Frontiers:
2004 International Round Square Congress Key Note Address
Given at Deerfield Academy on Thursday, September 30 2004
by Tom Heise
Deerfield Academy History Department Chair

Contested Terrain: The Frontier in American Culture and History

[1] Early in the morning on September 11, 2001 nineteen hijackers commandeered four commercial airliners, all heavily laden with fuel, and successfully crashed three of them into leading symbols of American power. At 8:45 American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. [2] Shortly after 9:00 United Airlines Flight 175 out of Boston hit the South Tower. At 9:40 American Airlines Flight 72 out of Washington smashed into the Pentagon. [3] At 10:00 the South Tower fell, the North Tower at 10:29. They crashed down with such great force that seismic registers recorded their fall as earthquakes. In a short, devastating morning 3000 people, representing 39 states and 80 countries, were killed.

As the twin towers burned, we saw extraordinary acts of heroism. [4] New York City's firefighters, many of whom gave their lives so that others might live, particularly captivated this nation. [5] They left the safety of the street and charged into the deadly chaos of unstable, smoke-filled skyscrapers to save those caught in the World Trade Center. The journalist William Langewiesche's book American Ground captures what many Americans believed they had witnessed. [6] The dead firemen, writes Langewiesche, were seen as

Brawny, square-jawed men, with young wives and children-perfectly tragic figures, unreliant on microchips and machines, who seemed to have sprung from the American earth like valiant heroes from a simpler time. [7] They had answered the call of history, rushed to the defense of the homeland, and unhesitatingly given their lives...America slipped into patterns of the past-with women at the hearth, men as their protectors, and swarthy strangers at the gate.

[8] The fabled American frontier, with larger-than-life heroes and outsized villains, had magically re-appeared in the most improbable time and place imaginable: at the dawn of the 21st century in the financial district of New York City.

[9] Langewiesche also finds much to admire in the frontier sensibility of those who cleared the debris from "ground zero," the site of the World Trade Center disaster. The construction crews who worked there, says Langewiesche, wore hardhats, carried union cards, and came from working class, ethnic backgrounds. [10] The men who flourished at the site were risk-takers with little regard for conventional ideas of safety. They operated in an environment without rules. They were improvisers who, with common sense and instinct, solved scores of unprecedented problems. "They were resourceful," writes Langewiesche. "They were like pioneers."

[11] At the site, these pioneers were confronted by an apocalyptic war zone that stretched across seventeen acres, a smoldering pile of wreckage laced with dangerous subterranean passages. It was, in short, a wilderness--a particularly modern kind: [12] "a terrain of tangled steel on an unimaginable scale, with mountainous slopes of breathing smoke and flame." Their job was to clear the wreckage, to recover the remains of those who died, to allow New York City to resume its customary business, and to prepare the site for reconstruction. [13] They finished the job in less than a year--a lasting tribute, concludes Langewiesche, to "a sort of American greatness," especially the "culture of improvisational genius" that prevailed at "ground zero."

Crises define us and reveal who we are. They also reveal who we think we are. [14] After September 11, references to the mythic Old West--a pageant filled with fearless explorers, rugged mountain men, intrepid pioneers, and tough-talking, gun-toting cowboys--abounded in the news media and in the declarations of our national leaders. Today, most Americans live in suburbs and see cowboys in commercials [15]--where, instead of protecting us from peril, they lure us to a vice-ridden intersection of tobacco, beer, honky tonks and pickup trucks. After September 11, the mythic cowboy sobered up, dusted himself off and resumed his service to the nation.

[16] In his assertions of national policy, President Bush relied heavily on the expressions and cadences of the mythical frontier. "[I]n order to fully defend America, we must defeat the evildoers where they hide. We must round them up and bring them to justice."[17] Identifying Osama bin Laden as "wanted, dead or alive," he vowed to "get him running. We'll smoke him out of his cave, and we'll get him." President Bush often described Saddam Hussein as an "outlaw." And outlaws, he declared, "will be found and brought to justice." "Bring 'em on," was the gauntlet he threw down to those who plotted attacks against U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The U.S. military even prepared a deck of cards to identify the "bad guys" in Iraq; Saddam Hussein was the ace of spades. After Saddam Hussein's capture last year, President Bush received his revolver as a trophy of war.

[18] Texas is steeped in cowboy culture and President Bush is from Texas, so his use of the idiom of the frontier West may simply be habit. Nevertheless, says one observer, "the image he is cultivating is that of the mythic cowboy, strong, morally upright, independent and God-fearing--a stalwart figure standing against chaos." [19] President Bush's rhetoric is built upon a stark, uncompromising divide-between good and evil, justice and injustice, civilization and savagery, freedom and tyranny, safety and terror, life and death. In his speech to the nation on September 11, he declared that "we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world." In that effort, "we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." Later that fall, President Bush further clarified the differences between "us" and "them":

This new enemy seeks to destroy our freedom and impose its views. We value life; the terrorists ruthlessly destroy it...[T]hose who celebrate the murder of innocent men, women and children have no religion, have no conscience and have no mercy. We wage a war to save civilization itself.

You're either with us or against us. There is much debate today about whether this way of seeing the world is wise or accurate. It does have the advantage of clarity--but at the cost, perhaps, of complexity. It is morally unambiguous--but it may too quickly demonize in instances when empathy and understanding would be more useful. A part of our American heritage, this outlook is not unique to President Bush nor was it invented by him: it is rooted in an interpretation of American history that places the frontier experience at the very center of our national story. [20] In this version Americans are all cowboys at heart, armed with six shooters, and forever on the lookout for hostile Indians and dangerous outlaws.

Where does the frontier worldview come from? Does it have a basis in historical fact? A little over one hundred years ago, a famous American historian said that it did. In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner declared, "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development." Weary of histories that emphasized America's debt to Europe, Turner believed that real Americans were born and raised along the dangerous boundary between civilization and wilderness:

The frontier is the line of the most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and the Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe…The fact is, here is a new product that is American.

The frontier experience, argued Turner, was the deepest well-spring of American national character. American self-reliance, practical ingenuity, individualism, resistance to authority, even democracy itself had developed as restless pioneers struggled to make their homes along the perilous edge of civilization.

Just as President Bush does today, Americans one hundred years ago eagerly embraced this glowing catalogue and explanation of American traits. [21] As great, sprawling industrial cities muscled their way up across America, connected to one another by hard-charging locomotives, and immigrants came by the millions from all over the world and changed the ethnic character of this country forever, Americans were uncomfortably aware they were entering a new age. [22] The frontier was gone. The Indian wars were over. The age of the mountain man, the cowboy, the solitary pioneer had passed. In a time of growing anxiety about the rising industrial order, Turner's thesis appealed to our nostalgic longing for a simpler, more heroic time. [23]

This nostalgia was not Turner's alone. One of the most popular artists in America in 1900 was Frederic Remington, whose depictions of cowboys and Indians captured the romance and the danger of the old frontier. One of the most popular writers of the time was Owen Wister, whose book The Virginian offered Americans the chivalric cowboy hero. And the dominant political figure of the early twentieth century was Teddy Roosevelt, [24] a self-styled rough-riding cowboy (who inconveniently happened to be from New York City). Part of our collective national response to this wistfulness was to create wilderness areas and national parks. [25]

Turner's thesis is not without problems, however. Historians have long used Turner's ideas for target practice and have shot his theory full of holes. Turner, they argue, mythologizes, oversimplifies, and distorts the frontier experience. More importantly, he fails to recognize the civilization and humanity of American Indians. So what was the frontier really like? One way to approach this question is to examine two of American history's best known frontier events: The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806 and the Deerfield Raid of 1704.

In 1804 the frontier was not mythical, it was real. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American claims extended to the Mississippi River, but not beyond, and American control of lands to the west was weak. [26] In the mid 1700s hunters, traders, and surveyors had pushed beyond the Allegheny and Smoky Mountains to explore the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. Many had followed Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and beyond. To landed and landless alike, the stories that filtered back inspired dreams of wealth and independence. The frontier beckoned Americans west: to uncharted, untamed wilderness, to unclaimed lands, to fresh starts and glittering opportunities, to conquest.

[27] Amidst the maps, books, gardens and safety of Monticello, his elegant plantation home in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson dreamed expansively of what the West might mean to this nation. He never set foot himself beyond the Appalachian Mountain range--clearly the actual exploring would be done by others--but was a lifelong advocate of western expansion all the same. "For Jefferson," writes the historian Joseph Ellis, "the West was America's future" and he thought "of the West in much the same way that some modern optimists think of technology, as almost endlessly renewable and boundlessly prolific." Jefferson envisioned a great migration of liberty-loving farmers that would overspread both North and South America. In 1801 Jefferson wrote that "it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand...and cover the whole northern if not the southern continent, with people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws." Jefferson was an empire builder and yeoman farmers were his imperial shock troops--and the western frontier was the key to it all.

[28] Elected to the first of his two terms as President in 1800, Thomas Jefferson's greatest achievement was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the acquisition of territory extending two thousand miles from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. For fifteen million dollars--just three cents an acre--paid to France, not the Indian inhabitants--Jefferson doubled the size of the United States and cleared the way for western expansion. At about the same time that he authorized the purchase, Jefferson also commissioned the most famous journey of exploration in American history: the Lewis and Clark Expedition. [29]

In the tradition of Christopher Columbus, James Cook, and Daniel Boone, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were to leave the comforts of civilization and venture into the vast unknown. Their journey across the trans-Mississippi West would show the way for others to follow. As they traveled, Lewis and Clark were to record all that they saw and learned about the country and its people. [30] But above all, stressed President Jefferson, their main object was to find the fabled if elusive Northwest Passage: "the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce." Jefferson, Lewis and Clark anticipated difficulty and danger but they were reassured by the ill-founded expectation that the geography of the West would prove essentially familiar: the Missouri River would be to the West what the Ohio River was to the East, the mountains of the West would be as low and passable as the Appalachians, and the Missouri Valley would prove a paradise to independent farmers.

[31] Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery numbered about 35 altogether: mainly Anglo-Americans, but also French Canadians, William Clark's black slave York, and a full-blood Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, who served as a guide and an interpreter for the mission. They left St. Louis in May of 1804 and traveled 28 months and 8000 miles before returning in September of 1806. Many were surprised to see them, having concluded months earlier that the members of this expedition were surely dead. [32]

In fact, all but one survived. Only one suffered a gunshot wound; quite by accident a member of the Corps shot Meriwether Lewis in the butt. Their return assured their place in history; a contemporary historian writes that the "Lewis and Clark Expedition became a defining symbol of the national frontier [and] remains among the most essential stories of the American past." Why? Part of the reason is that Lewis and Clark so completely fulfill our expectations of frontier heroes. They were brave, resourceful, inventive, determined, and lucky; they overcame every obstacle they encountered. Of these qualities, their journal entries offer ample testimony:

William Clark [February 13, 1805]: I returned last night from a hunting party much fatigued, having walked 30 miles on the ice and through points of woodland in which the snow was nearly knee deep...walking on uneven ice has blistered the bottoms of my feet, and walking is painful to me.
[33] Meriwether Lewis [June 14, 1805]: On being attacked by a grizzly bear: I drew up my gun to shoot, but at the same instant recollected that she was not loaded and...he was then briskly advancing on me. It was an open level plain, not a bush within miles nor a tree within less than three hundred yards of me; the river bank was sloping and not more than three feet above the level of the water. In short there was no place by means of which I could conceal myself from this monster before I could charge my rifle; in this situation I thought of retreating in a brisk walk as fast as he was advancing until I could reach a tree about 300 yards below me, but I had no sooner turned myself about but he pitched at me, open mouthed and full speed.
I ran about 80 yards and found he gained on me fast. I then run into the water [so that] he would be obliged to swim and...I could defend myself with my espontoon. Accordingly I ran hastily into the water about waist deep, and faced about and presented the point of my espontoon.
At this instant he arrived at the edge of the water within about 20 feet of me; the moment I put myself in this attitude of defense he suddenly wheeled about as if frightened, declined the combat on such unequal grounds, and retreated with quite as great precipitation as he had just pursued me.

The hardship and danger they encountered, however, never diminished their curiosity or capacity for wonder. [34] Far beyond the frontier line, Lewis and Clark marveled at the strange novelty of the West. Their eager, open-eyed encounters with the unfamiliar are also a key part of this classic frontier story.

Meriwether Lewis [July 19, 1805]: This evening we entered much the most remarkable cliffs that we have yet seen. These cliffs rise from the waters edge on either side perpendicularly to the height of about 1200 feet...From the singular appearance of this place I called it the "gates of the rocky mountains."
Meriwether Lewis [July 22, 1805]: [Sacagawea] recognizes the country...This piece of information has cheered the spirits of the party who now begin to console themselves with the anticipation of shortly seeing the head of the Missouri, yet unknown to the civilized world.
[35] Meriwether Lewis [August 16, 1805]: Observations of hungry Shoshone companions after a member of the expedition had killed a deer: [T]hey dismounted and ran in tumbling over each other like a parcel of famished dogs each seizing and tearing away a part of the intestines which had been previously thrown out…
The scene was such when I arrived that had I not...had a pretty keen appetite myself I am confident I should not have tasted any part of the venison shortly. Each one had a piece of some description and all eating most ravenously. Some were eating the kidneys...and liver and the blood [ran] from the corners of their mouths. Others were in a similar situation with the paunch and guts…[One] had provided himself with about nine feet of the small guts one end of which he was chewing on while with his hands he was squeezing the contents out at the other.

[36] Lewis' emphasis on the wild savagery of Indians is a common if regrettable feature of many historical frontier accounts. But the Lewis and Clark journals also express an open-minded admiration of Indian virtues.

Meriwether Lewis [August 19, 1805]: [The Shoshones] are frank, communicative, fair in dealing, generous with the little they possess, extremely honest, and by no means beggarly. Each individual is his own sovereign master, and acts from the dictates of his own mind; the authority of the chief being nothing more than mere admonition supported by the influence which...his own exemplary conduct may have acquired him in the minds of the individuals who compose the band.

Lewis and Clark not only respected Shoshone independence, they also embraced Shoshone community life. They took part in Shoshone rituals, learned Shoshone customs, and shared in ways that Shoshone culture expected. [37] At other times and with other cultures, they did the same. There was a frequent exchange of medical remedies. Members of the Expedition tried new foods. Perhaps these frontier experiences changed them. In 1805, Clark recorded a vote taken by all members of the Corps--including the black slave York and the Indian woman Sacagawea--deciding where they would camp for the winter before returning along the trail they had blazed. This event would have been unthinkable on the "civilized" side of the frontier.

[38] Unable to impose their own expectations on the West, Lewis and Clark were compelled to compromise, an essential frontier survival skill that is often overlooked. The frontier forced them to adapt, to change, to adjust to reality. They had to accept the fact that the West was not empty, a truly fortunate discovery. Lewis and Clark would not have survived without the frequent and generous assistance of Native American communities along the way. From Indians who lived in complex worlds of their own, members of the Expedition received food to eat, homes in which to sleep, horses to ride, and information about trails to follow. There was very little hostile contact at all. Thus, says historian James Ronda, we learn that "the lives of individual human beings and great nations can never be told as simple stories with easy plots and comforting conclusions. Lewis and Clark were forced to confront ambiguity, the hard fact that real life is more hazy gray than stark black and white." In their journey beyond the frontier line, the members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition discovered more than they expected.

They also discovered less than they expected. The Northwest Passage did not exist. Western North America was not at all like the Eastern part. They never found Jefferson's agrarian paradise; no one would ever again mistake North Dakota for the Garden of Eden. How did Thomas Jefferson react to the bad news? The same way presidents respond today: he "redefined the mission," stating that the Expedition was mainly about science, and declared himself entirely satisfied by the Expedition's contributions to the betterment of humanity.

Jefferson and Lewis and Clark understood that the opportunities presented by the frontier outweighed the danger. [39] One hundred years earlier, residents of the English wilderness outpost of Deerfield surely feared that the dangers of the frontier outweighed the opportunity. In 1704, Deerfield was imperiled--and had been for some time. It perched precariously on the northwestern edge of English settlement in New England. The residents of Deerfield were unwelcome newcomers. [40] This land had long belonged to the Pocumtucks, an Indian confederacy of 1500 who had called this place home for as long as they could remember. The Pocumtucks and their predecessors cultivated this valley for over 1000 years; they inhabited this valley for nearly 10,000 years. They had only recently been dispossessed; crushed by a Mohawk attack, they were then victimized by a treaty of dubious legality that ceded their ancestral lands to English settlers.

[41]Upon their arrival in the 1660s, the English newcomers divided Pocumtuck land amongst themselves, built houses and barns, constructed fences, and raised vegetables. Initial English settlers were subsistence farmers delighted to have their own land--the most fertile in all of New England. Passable farmers, they were prolific parents. They had a singular talent, according to one source, for producing "New England's primary crop: large families with hordes of children." Their fertility alarmed Natives and officials of New France, who worried that New England's rapid population growth would strengthen England's imperial presence in the Northeast at their expense.

[42] In 1675, the Wampanoag Indian chief Metacom, or King Philip as he was called by settlers, rallied New England's Indians in a final furious effort to regain their land and expel the English intruders. Per capita, King Philip's War was the bloodiest war in American history. The first English settlement planted here in Deerfield was soon a smoldering ruin. Fourteen inhabitants of Deerfield were killed in the Bloody Brook Massacre of September 1675. King Philip's warriors scalped their victims, stripped them naked and burned the English village of Deerfield to the ground. For a short time Pocumtucks actually re-occupied their ancestral home.

[43] More deadly still was the English response to Bloody Brook. In May of 1676, William Turner of Hatfield led one hundred fifty men in a pre-dawn raid against an encampment of Indians at the Great Falls of the Connecticut River--just a few miles from here. This was a well-known fishing site at which old Indian men and women and young children had gathered to re-provision after the winter. They posted no guards. They learned of the attack when Turner and his men opened fire into their wigwams as they slept. Many never awoke. Others raced to the river for safety and were swept over the falls to their deaths. In this savage reprisal for Bloody Brook, Turner's force killed nearly two hundred and fifty Indians.

Just two years later, Indians hit the survivors of Deerfield again: one died in the raid, one prisoner was burned alive by his Indian captors, and two were sold into captivity in Canada. In a letter to the General Court of Massachusetts in early 1678, Deerfield's survivors saw little cause for optimism: [O]ur estates are wasted," they wrote, "...our houses have been rifled and then burnt...the ablest of our inhabitants killed." The town they had worked so hard to build had reverted to "wilderness, a dwelling for owls."

[44] Still, Deerfield's frontier settlers hung on and rebuilt-only to suffer catastrophic loss in 1704. At the close of the seventeenth century, as hostility between England and France worsened and skirmishes with nearby Indians became more frequent, worries about a major attack by French and Indian forces on Deerfield began to mount. Historian John Demos notes that local residents recorded "unusual portents": "a trampling noise around the fort, as if it were beset by Indians"; a "black cloud" over a nearby town that "burned as red as blood." Town leaders strengthened the fortress walls surrounding the village and begged colony officials to send military help. Deerfield's minister John Williams noted that "strangers tell us they would not live where we do for twenty times as much as we do…: the frontier difficulties of a place so remote from others and so exposed as ours, are more than be known."

Early in the morning on February 29, 1704, the attack came. French and Indian warriors fell on Deerfield, killing more than fifty people, many of them very young children, and carrying over 100 townspeople into captivity--including the Reverend John Williams and several members of his family. The raiders also fired houses and barns and slaughtered livestock before retreating northward to Canada. [45] Indian attackers had different motives. Some desired revenge. Some sought captives. Some hoped to reclaim the Connecticut Valley. The French hoped to blunt English imperial growth in the New World and, in seizing John Williams, to deliver a crushing spiritual and psychological blow. And for Puritans desperate to know God's grace, the capture of their Protestant minister by the Catholic French was truly devastating; indeed, this was ominous news throughout British North America. Here at last, apparently, is the hard line of the frontier: deeply divided, remorseless and uncompromising, a zone of deadly violence in which people on either side of the line fought savagely not just for a way of life but for their very lives themselves.

Yet even in the deadly world of 1704, the frontier was less black and white than one might think. The frontier did not neatly separate Europeans and Indians; there were Europeans on both sides of the frontier line. And, however distinct and absolute the boundaries between English settlers and Indians may have seemed, and however secure the English hoped to make those boundaries, the frontier remained, according to historian Colin Calloway, "porous." As Lewis and Clark would re-discover one hundred years later, in colonial New England "Europeans and Indians collided in competition and open conflict, but they also forged paths of cooperation and uneasy coexistence." In fact, several heavily used Indian trails ran through Deerfield. Indians were, therefore, frequent visitors here as they were in European cities all over North America. Indians possessed rights under English law; 17th century court records show that one Indian successfully sued in English court for vandalism to his canoe. [46] In the mid-1600s, Indian wampum was legal currency in certain transactions between the English and Indians. Indians participated eagerly in trade networks that included Europeans and their goods; they were critical players in the fur trade.

[47] But the most revealing evidence for the fluid nature of the frontier involves the taking of captives. Indians did so in the hope of adopting prisoners into their own communities, often to replace those lost to disease or to war. Europeans went to great lengths to recover those taken captive--only to discover that many preferred their new lives and wanted to stay with their Indian families. Remarking on this much-feared phenomenon, Benjamin Franklin observed that "no European who has tasted Savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies." The most famous example in American history of a captive-turned-Indian is Eunice Williams, the daughter of Reverend John Williams, who was carried away to Canada in the 1704 raid on Deerfield. Once there, Eunice took on a Mohawk name, soon forgot how to speak English, converted to Catholicism and married into the Kahnawake Mohawks of Canada, with whom she lived happily. On several occasions, Eunice visited her relatives here in the valley but she resisted their fervent appeals to return "home." Eunice Williams was a Mohawk to the end of her days.

As a place and as an idea, the frontier in American history has always been contested terrain. For centuries, people in America have struggled to control the frontier and its meaning. In those struggles there is much to learn about our strengths and our weaknesses, our triumphs and our failures; the American frontier story is a source of celebration and of sorrow. However, in seeing the frontier as a challenge to overcome, we risk not seeing the frontier's power to change us. Despite our efforts at control, even conquest, the frontier in American history has often imposed its own meanings and tendencies upon those who have ventured there.

[48] As you discuss with one another the problems and the promise of the frontier--in American culture and your own--you might consider a well-known artifact of the 1704 raid housed in a nearby museum: the Indian House Door. Three hundred years ago, on the morning of February 29, 1704, it protected a terrified family against axe-wielding Mohawk warriors, who cut a small hole in the door but never succeeded in knocking it down. A potent symbol of the frontier, the Indian House Door represents to some the determination, courage, and heroic sacrifice of those who fought to defend themselves, their families, and English settlement against implacable enemies. George Sheldon, a 19th century descendant of that family, urged the preservation of "that ancient door which withstood the blows of tomahawks, and interposed itself as an unyielding barrier between those of gentle blood and merciless savages." [49] But to others the Indian House Door perpetuates a mythical and dangerous self-perception in which the goodness of one side has always come at the expense of the other. So what do we do with a relic of a hardened frontier line that places civilization on one side and savagery on the other? Doesn't the door support an interpretation of American history that emphasizes conflict and violent conquest over cooperation and cross-cultural understanding? Perhaps there is a middle ground. The Indian House Door was a barrier--when it was closed. But when it was open, it beckoned people on either side to cross into a new world.

SOURCES

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Bush, George W. Various speeches and news conference transcripts, 2001-present.

Calloway, Colin G. New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Haefeli, Evan and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

Jones, Landon Y., ed. The Essential Lewis and Clark. New York: Ecco Press, 2000.

Langewiesche, William. American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. New York: North Point Press, 2002.

Melvoin, Richard I. New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.

Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) / Memorial Hall Museum. Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704. Available from World Wide Web @ http://www.1704.deerfield.history.museum/. Accessed September 2004.

Ronda, James P. Finding the West: Explorations with Lewis and Clark. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

Sheldon, George. A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, 2 vols, 1895-1896. Reprint: Deerfield, Massachusetts: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1983.

Slaughter, Thomas P. Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.

Westcott, Kathryn. "Bush Revels in Cowboy Speak." BBC News Online. 6 June 2003. Available from World Wide Web @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/americas/2968176.stm. Accessed August 2004.