Borderlands

Borderlands are places between colonies or nation-states. They are usually areas contested by several peoples. For example, in the colonial period the present-day southeastern United States was a borderland, contested by the British, the Spanish, the French, and numerous Native peoples, including the Cherokee, the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw.

The historiographic concept of the borderlands has a contested history itself. Historians have long argued over whether we should see the expansion of European peoples onto the lands of Native Americans as a frontier or as many borderlands at specific times and places. Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” developed in the late 19th century, described a process of white Americans moving west onto new lands. According to Turner, as the frontier spread west, it brought new economic and social stages. Places where Indians had hunted for their livelihoods became populated by traders, then ranchers, farmers, and eventually industrial city dwellers.

Recognizing that Turner’s model omitted both nonBritish colonizers and a substantial phase of co-occupation, his student Herbert Eugene Bolton pioneered the concept of borderlands to study Spanish North America. In the borderlands that Bolton described, Spanish officials, soldiers, and friars coexisted with Indians for centuries on the same land, in contrast to Turner’s advancing line.

Nearly a century after Turner and Bolton formulated their models, historians still struggle with the question of which concept is more useful for studying Indian-white interactions. Historians following in Turner’s footsteps see white expansion as a process that gradually enveloped Native peoples. They have improved Turner’s deficient attention to the Indian side of the frontier. In Turner’s work Indians appeared only in the first short stage of supposed progress to civilization. His successors have recognized the continuing Indian presence and have tended to see the process as one of the increasing power of white people to control the land rather than Turner’s normative process of “civilization.” However, more recent frontier studies still tend to center on white processes. Indians are present, but usually only react to white actions. Another criticism is that the term frontier may be too weighted by its connection with the glorification of European settlement to be of much analytical use.

The concept of borderlands is appealing to many historians who want to study the interactions of various peoples—Native American, European, and African—in colonial America. Because the borderlands school generally recognized a longer and more important Native American role than did Turner, the New Western and New Indian schools of historians have tended to follow a borderlands approach. They see borderlands as places where different peoples came together and had to figure out how to coexist.

By studying borderlands, historians have reached several important general insights. The European conquest of the Americas was not inevitable. In fact, in many places and times, Native Americans converted Europeans to their diplomatic, economic, social, and cultural ways. Colonial power had its limits. Even regions that European powers claimed to rule were often, on the ground, ruled by Native peoples. As places of cross-cultural contact, borderlands are ideal for comparative cultural history. For example, many Europeans who observed Native Americans in the colonial period noted that women did the farming, in contrast to gender roles in Europe.

Europeans tended to believe that Native American men forced the women in their societies into the “drudgery” of agricultural work. This misconception reveals much about the gender systems and beliefs of European and Native American societies. Finally, by studying a wide variety of Indian-white reactions, borderlands studies have helped to destroy the myth that Indians were (or are) monolithic and powerless.

See also Ggrnstalk; Hendrick; La Demoiselle.

Further reading: Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” {American Historical Review, 104 (June 1999): 814-841.

—Kathleen DuVal

Bosomworth, Mary Musgrove (1700?-1765) trader, interpreter

Mary Musgrove Bosomworth gained distinction in the 18th century as an astute businesswoman and landowner. Born “Goosaponakeesa” to a Muscogean Greek mother of high status and Edward Griffin, a British trader from Charleston, South Carolina, she became an important intercultural mediator who negotiated peace between the resident Greek population and the British authorities in what became the colony of Georgia.

Goosaponakeesa lived as a member of the Greek Wind clan in the central Georgia village of Coweta for the first seven years of her life, before traveling to Pon Pon, South Carolina, to learn the language and culture of her father’s people, who christened her “Mary.” She and her husband John Musgrove, whom she married in 1717, set up a lucrative trading post near the Savannah River, where Mary attracted the attention of British general James Oglethorpe upon his arrival in 1733. Oglethorpe’s Grown-appointed mission to establish the land between Spanish Florida and South Carolina as a British colony required that he hire an effective liaison to negotiate peaceful relations with the Greek, a task ideally suited to Mary Musgrove due to her mixed heritage and long association with tribal leaders, particularly one of their chiefs, Tomochichi. The political alliance that Goosaponakeesa facilitated between the British and the Greek led to the colonization of Savannah in 1733, followed by all of Georgia later that year.

The Musgroves subsequently expanded trading operations at “the Gowpens” at Yamacraw Bluff, near their original trading post site, where they supplied European settlers with provisions and recruited Greek warriors to assist Oglethorpe in repelling Spanish forces that threatened from the south. This post, stocked with perishables raised in the Musgroves’ own fields with the help of black, Indian, and Spanish slave labor, grew to represent one-sixth of all the Indian trade that took place in Charleston. Mary’s economic success sustained her through the deaths of her husband and their three young sons from malaria in 1735. Her business acumen, as well as an annual salary of 100 pounds sterling paid by the British ambassador until his departure in 1743, guaranteed her financial security despite the tenuousness of her landownership after John’s death. Although she was born into a matrilineal Indian society in which women controlled the land, widowhood left her vulnerable to losing the holdings she had accumulated with Musgrove. The gender prejudices of British law necessitated Mary’s subsequent marriage to indentured servant Jacob Matthews in 1737, a strategic union meant to secure her property against seizure by colonial trustees. Shortly thereafter, she established another trading post at Mount Venture on Georgia’s Altamaha River, a station that survived Matthews. His premature passing in 1742 made possible the third and final marriage for Goosaponakeesa two years later, this time to an occasional minister named Thomas Bosomworth, for whom she had worked as an interpreter. This partnership signified a sharp rise in status for Mary, whose two previous husbands had belonged to the lower ranks of the colonial social order.

Beginning in 1738, a series of Creek and British land grants, including the Georgia barrier islands of St. Catherines, Ossabaw, and Sapelo, provided additional compensation for her service as a diplomat. The Indian gifts, however, precipitated a legal battle between Musgrove and the British courts over title to the lands, ultimately pitting Creek against English claims to territorial sovereignty. Unfortunately for Mary, the doctrine of discovery utterly privileged British property rights and thereby legally nullified the Creeks’ land gifts, but she continued to petition for title to her alleged holdings. Authorities felt little urgency to settle these land claims, first filed in 1747, until the Seven Years’ War suggested a new potential threat to English colonial security. A change in leadership at mid-century weakened the relationship between the Georgia government and the Creeks, and fear of reprisal for the as yet unresolved claims of the popular and powerful Goosaponakeesa prompted the London courts to seek a swift compromise with the Bosomworths. One colonial official described Musgrove’s esteem among her mother’s people, reporting that she “is looked upon by the whole Creek Nation, as their Natural Princess, and any Injury done to her will be equally resented as if done to the whole Nation.” British land laws notwithstanding, in July 1759 Mary at last received title to St. Catherines Island as well as ?2,100 from the sale of Sapelo, Ossabaw, and the Yamacraw Bluff property.