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In 1996, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington proposed a paradigm for understanding the world of the 21st century. He argued that the major civilizations would inevitably be the source of most major future conflicts because of their very different worldviews and understandings of personal identity and religious meaning. Since the publication of Huntington's book, numerous events have lent support to his thesis: terrorist attacks in the United States, Spain, and England; the concern over Muslim immigration in Europe and Hispanic immigration in the United States; the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict; and the war in Iraq. Of course not all scholars agree with Huntington's perspective; in part, his book was itself a response to Francis Fukuyama's argument that Western liberal democracy was evolving as the dominant form of human government and that the future would see only minor conflicts over peripheral issues.
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The issue of the correct lens through which to see both world history and future events is a controversial one, and the book reviewed here, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails, by Michael L. Tate, is not an attempt to provide a big-picture explanation of the forces that generate either cooperation or conflict. Still, Tate's work sheds some light on the question of whether civilizations and different worldviews are ultimately and always in conflict.
Tate examines a specific period in U.S. history and a specific set of events, namely the relationship between the Native Americans and the overland travelers in the heyday of wagon train emigration, from 1840 to 1870. During this period, more than 550,000 men, women, and children moved via wagon trains from jumping-off places such as St. Joseph, Missouri and Omaha, Nebraska to Oregon and California. In his case-study of this experience, Tate provides counter-evidence with respect to prevailing wisdom about how civilizations interact. He argues that popular images of a "clash of civilizations" on the overland trail are vastly overdrawn; indeed, "this vast region along the trails was more of a 'cooperative meeting ground' than a 'contested meeting ground.' "
In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that Tate's work fits well with my research with Terry L. Anderson, where we also argue the West was not nearly as violent or anarchic as usually pictured.1 We find, as Tate does, that Indians and settlers interacted rather peacefully for a long period of time. We also find that effective systems of internal governance evolved for wagon trains; that the several thousand mining camps in the Sierra Nevadas were able to discover and enforce workable rules for establishing and maintaining claims that did not involve large amounts of violence; and that the movement of cattle from Texas to the northern ranges was primarily an exercise in cooperation rather than conflict. We argue that the evolution of water rights and irrigation institutions was remarkably effective, and that home-grown institutions such as the round-up among cattle ranchers solved most collective-action problems in a relatively peaceful way.
Tate takes up in much more detail, however, a very specific issue with respect to popular conceptions of violence and conflict on the frontier: the familiar assumption that wagon trains making their trek from their points of embarkation to the gold fields in California or the farming land in Oregon faced constant depredation from the Indian population. Tate is a careful scholar and presents considerable evidence that both the members of wagon trains and the indigenous population saw enormous potential for gains from trade through repeated interaction. The differences in wealth levels and knowledge of the two populations meant there were numerous ways in which profitable trades could occur. In many cases, Indians settled along the trail and established themselves as middlemen in the exchange system, trading native goods for manufactured items that were both more valuable to themselves and to remote tribes further from the trail. The Indians also provided ferry service across many rivers that were difficult to ford, acted as guides, and also provided fresh draft animals in trade for worn out ones along the trail.
