"The Chiefs Now in This City": Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America by Colin G. Calloway (review)

At the enormous conference between Indigenous and colonial leaders in Augusta, Georgia, in November 1763, a Cherokee leader from Chota staged a piece of political theater. Kittagusta, “the Prince of Chota,” stretched out before the assembled delegates “a string of beads with three knots.” He explained that the first knot was Chota, the leading town of the Overhill Cherokee. The last knot was Charleston, the main town of the Carolina colonists. The knot in between was Fort Prince George, the small British encampment that had served as a major trading depot through the 1750s and was the site of a treacherous colonial massacre of Cherokee hostages in 1760. Three years later, Kittagusta expressed hope that the talks between each town “shall always be kept straight.”1 Kittagusta’s theatrical flourish speaks to many of the themes of Colin G. Calloway’s “The Chiefs Now in This City”: Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America. Firstly, the book shows how strongly Native Americans in the early modern era incorporated colonial centers into their own geographies. Secondly, it demonstrates that they understood those centers in relational and comparative ways to their own towns. Finally, Calloway emphasizes a history of nonviolent exchange and communication between Natives and European settlers in early North America that is often swamped by the more dramatic episodes of warfare and bloodshed. Kittagusta’s pointed inclusion of Fort Prince George’s darker role in the Cherokees’ past, as a site of massacre as well as of trade, also reminded his audience that he never forgot the deception and danger that colonists always posed—a theme to which Calloway’s book gestures perhaps less than Kittagusta would have liked. Though Calloway flags the “dispossession and racial violence” (194) of colonial American history, he focuses most of his attention on the way that Indians negotiated for peace, trade, and work, and on how they “adapted to new pressures” (3). This decision to emphasize the more peaceful forms of encounter between Natives and settlers is deliberate; noting the magnitude of work—including his own—that already exists on treaties and frontier violence, Calloway argues here for a deeper inquiry into