Review of White Man's Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade and Prohibition in Indian Country, 1802-1892 By William E. Unrau

Authors

Maril Hazlett, University of Kansas

Date of this Version

Spring 1998

Document Type

Article

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 1998, pp. 179-80.

Comments

Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

This book examines how the federal government and private capital, through interlocking agendas, used the alcohol trade in nineteenth-century Indian country to achieve the removal and dispossession of Native peoples from their remaining lands. William E. Unrau argues that federal Indian land cession policies influenced the increase in the region's alcohol trade, thereby ensuring the failure of Indian prohibition. His analysis, challenging the racist view that Indians are by nature disposed to alcohol, claims instead that whites in Indian country "set the standard" for Indian drinking.

Unrau proves that poorly drafted prohibition legislation, conflicting court decisions, and non-enforcement of treaty and legislative guarantees caused the failure of Indian prohibition. He also describes how non-Indian market forces used the corrupt annuity payment system to increase Indian access to alcohol, making it possible for non-Indians to gain access to Indian assets and lands. These nonIndians' perceptions of "savage" Indian alcohol consumption in turn contributed to the devaluation of Indian sovereignty and were invoked to deny Indians "civilized" human rights.

The author also claims that Indian alcohol consumption was in part learned behavior from whites, Indians having observed white, male drinking patterns at army forts and along trade routes, then imitating them. He also discusses the theory of Indian drinking as a protest against non-Indian regulations and Indians' progressively marginal status. Given the paucity of Indian accounts to support this, however, he cautions that the evidence is thin. His point still holds that the "postremovalliquor trade was socially and economically devastating to most western Indians while at the same time providing considerable economic resources for the white invasion of the transMissouri West .... "