White People, Indians and Highlanders

[Sir William]

Calloway has written a number of books on the American Indian. I've read most of his books and always find them well-written, well-researched, well-reasoned, enlightening, entertaining and worth the time to read. Up to now my favorite is an essay he wrote on the White Indian - colonists who decided to live among the Indians instead of the European settlements.

In this book he does a comparative analysis between the Scottish Highland (and to lesser extent the Lowland Scot) and American Indian cultures, and how they responded to English efforts to conquer and control them. He contends that both the Highland and Indian cultures were similar in many respects, thus both had an appreciation and respect for the other that they did not hold for the English or other Europeans.

He suggests the Highlanders better adapted to English subjugation, not only assimilating into the greater British Empire but carving out particlar niches for themselves by becoming the predominant interactors with the American Indian.

Since I read quite a bit of American frontier history, to include books on the Eastern Woodland Indians, European colonists, Highland soldiers, and traders to the Indians, this book had particular appeal to me. I found his arguments persuasive and in many ways agreeing with my own analysis.

When I go camping next week I think I'll take this book along for a reread.