The Texture of Contact is a landmark study of Iroquois and European communities and coexistence in eastern North America before the American Revolution. David L. Preston details the ways in which European and Iroquois settlers on the frontiers creatively adapted to each other’s presence, weaving webs of mutually beneficial social, economic, and religious relationships that sustained the peace for most of the eighteenth century.

 

Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined archival research, Preston describes everyday encounters between Europeans and Indians along the frontiers of the Iroquois Confederacy in the St. Lawrence, Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Ohio valleys. Homesteads, taverns, gristmills, churches, and markets were frequent sites of intercultural exchange and negotiation. Complex diplomatic and trading relationships developed as a result of European and Iroquois settlers bartering material goods. Innovative land-sharing arrangements included the common practice of Euroamerican farmers living as tenants of the Mohawks, sometimes for decades. This study reveals that the everyday lives of Indians and Europeans were far more complex and harmonious than past histories have suggested. Preston’s nuanced comparisons between various settlements also reveal the reasons why peace endured in the Mohawk and St. Lawrence valleys while warfare erupted in the Susquehanna and Ohio valleys.

 

One of the most comprehensive studies of eighteenth-century Iroquois history, The Texture of Contact broadens our understanding of eastern North America’s frontiers and the key role that the Iroquois played in shaping that world.

David L. Preston is an assistant professor of history at the Citadel.

"Preston's astute analysis challenges our notions of the geographic and racial barriers that separated native and colonial peoples along the early American frontier. In settler communities stretching from Montreal to western Maryland, he recovers the contours of everyday contact, negotiation, and exchange among peoples from remarkably diverse backgrounds, illuminating the bonds that held them together and the conflicts that eventually drove them apart. This book is an enjoyable and rewarding read for anyone interested in the fate of the Iroquois and their neighbors in eighteenth-century America."—Timothy J. Shannon, author of Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier

"Through deep research in neglected manuscripts, David Preston recovers a world where Native Americans and European colonists traded, ate, slept, drank, and fought together on intimate terms negotiated far from the prying eyes of imperial officials. Only by appreciating these dense human connections, he compellingly argues, can we understand the murderous racial hatreds that seized the region when war came in the late eighteenth century—and the enduring legacy of those hatreds for the continent’s history."—Daniel K. Richter, author of Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America