Marking Native Borders: Indigenous Geography and American Empire in the Early Tennessee Country

Since time immemorial, Native peoples’ understandings of space and territory have defined the landscape of the Tennessee Country—the region drained by the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries. Marking Native Borders challenges the narrative of inevitable U.S. expansion by exploring how Cherokees and Chickasaws used these notions of space and territory in new and different ways to counter the encroachment of white settlers and land speculators in the late eight...