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

University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. — 318 p.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. The massive threat such alliances posed, recognized by contemporary whites from all walks of life, prompted a terror that proved a major factor in the formulation of Indian and military policy in North America. Indian unity, especially in the form of military alliance, was the most consistent, universal fear of Anglo-Americans in the late colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods. This fear was so pervasive - and so useful for unifying whites - that Americans exploited it long after the threat of a general Indian alliance had passed.Drawing on eighteen different archives, covering four nations and eleven states, and on more than six-dozen period newspapers - and incorporating the views of British and Spanish authorities as well as their American rivals - Red Dreams, White Nightmares is the most comprehensive account ever written of how fear, oftentimes resulting in "Indian-hating", directly influenced national policy in early America.Robert M. Owens is Associate Professor of History at Wichita State University. He specializes in colonial U.S. history and the Early Republic. He is the author of Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (OU Press, 2007). His articles have appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic and the Journal of Illinois History.