Richter opens by describing his visit to St. Louis, Missouri, where the Gateway Arch—a symbol of westward expansion in the 19th century—as well as the courthouse famous for the Dred Scott case brought to his mind “how freedom and unfreedom, expansion and dispossession, entwined to create the nation’s story” (2). He explains that his book will reverse the conventional “master narrative” of American history that sees European settlers as the protagonists and Indigenous people as passive victims.

The area of present-day Missouri was at one time the heartland of eastern Indian country, home to what scholars now call “Mississippian” societies. These societies flourished during a climatic warming trend during the late Middle Ages that resulted in a “burst of agricultural creativity” (5) centering on the key crops of squash, maize, and beans. After the warming period gave way to a Little Ice Age, Mississippian societies went into decline, breaking up into several linguistic groups.

Although Indian country was decentralized by the collapse of these societies, it remained, for a time, connected by trade and communication routes across the continent. Then, a biological challenge decimated the Indigenous population: contact with European settlers brought diseases to which Indigenous people lacked immunity. Despite these devastating events, Euro-Americans did not gain total control of the territory that Richter calls Indian country until the early decades of the 19th century.