Warfare « The Junto

In February 2017, our colleagues at Nursing Clio issued a call for a series on nutrition, resulting in a variety of posts on nutrition, food, and hunger over the several months that followed. This call aims to build on that work by focusing specifically on Vast Early America. The co-editors (Carla Cevasco and Rachel Herrmann) welcome posts spanning the fifteenth thru mid-nineteenth centuries that cover a broadly defined Atlantic World. Topics might include (but are not limited to) agriculture, cookbooks, diplomacy, foodways, hunting, livestock, medicinal recipes, markets, pharmacopeias, dietetics, single-commodity foodstuffs, and warfare. Posts should be between 750 and 1,500 words; footnotes are strongly encouraged. We also recommend reading our contribution guidelines. Please send posts to both email addresses (Carla.Cevasco@rutgers.edu and HerrmannR@cardiff.ac.uk) by March 15, 2019. We will aim to respond by early April with an eye toward running this series in late April and early May.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Lately I’ve been thinking about names and what they mean. The Seneca orator Red Jacket had several of them. Red Jacket lived on the Buffalo Creek reservation, and according to Christopher Densmore, he was less influential than other leaders—though his name increasingly appears in council speeches in the 1780s and 1790s.[1] U.S. Indian commissioner Timothy Pickering recorded his Seneca name as “Saco-que-y-wan-tau,” translating as “Sleeper Wake up.”[2] Usually Red Jacket seems to appear in the records as Red Jacket—but I am interested in a fourth name. According to most historians Red Jacket’s alias, Cow Killer, was derogatory, meant to tease him for “his distinct disinclination to fight during the American Revolution.”[3] Continue reading →