Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind, 1763-1815

From the end of Pontiac’s War in 1763 through the War of 1812, fear—even paranoia—drove Anglo-American Indian policies. In Red Dreams, White Nightmares, Robert M. Owens views conflicts between whites and Natives in this era—invariably treated as discrete, regional affairs—as the inextricably related struggles they were.

As this book makes clear, the Indian wars north of the Ohio River make sense only within the context of Indians’ efforts to recruit their southern cousins to their cause. Th...