Timelines: Anthologizing the Frontier in the Era of the Western Confederacy

This chapter shows how 1780s–1790s captivity anthologies edited by Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Matthew Carey configure the frontier as a timeline that marks the edge of U.S. national history and justifies the seizure of Native lands. I argue that this development is effected by projections of the Revolutionary war backward and forward through time as a freedom struggle between Americans and a supposedly perennial “Indian” enemy. Using theories of the collection by Jean Baudrillard and Susan Stewart, I show how the anthology’s serial format supports this portrayal. However, Brackenridge and Carey’s anthologies also betray this function, often preserving disturbing memories of the bitter violence between British, settler, and Native constituencies that wracked Indian country during the American War. Taking Arthur St. Clair’s 1791 defeat by the Western Confederacy as a flashpoint, this chapter reads popular elegies and broadsides alongside a captivity narrative, The Remarkable Adventures of Jackson Johonnet (1792), which recalls the St. Clair campaign as a scene of repetitive capture and inertia. Native insurgency works through these texts to stall the colonial telos of U.S. nationalist time in queer revolutionary times of recurrence and redundancy.