Reviewed by:

• Blood in the Borderlands: Conflict, Kinship, and the Bent Family, 1821–1920 by David C. Beyreis
• William S. Kiser

The Bents ranked among the most well-known families in the nineteenth century American West, and this book demonstrates the many ways in which brothers William and Charles—along with their wives and biracial children—navigated the region's social and cultural systems. Using kinship as an analytical framework, David Beyreis argues that "family ties and the creation of alliance networks helped the Bents become phenomenally successful businessmen" (1). Claiming that previous books on the western frontier have placed "too much emphasis on stability and intercultural accommodation" (2), the author also aims to highlight the role of conflict and violence in shaping regional affairs.

Bent family members offer a compelling case study because they participated in so many formative frontier events and processes, including the fur trade, the Santa Fe trade, Mexican land grants, Texan filibustering, the U.S. invasion of New Mexico in 1846, Indian treaty councils, U.S. Army campaigns, the 1859 Pike's Peak Gold Rush, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Dawes Act, and Indian boarding schools. Each of these themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but Beyreis ties them together in a unique way with his quasi-biographical focus on a single family. Notably, this approach allows the author to place women at the center of the narrative. Readers will come away with a clear understanding of how Hispanas like María Ignacia Jaramillo (Charles Bent's partner), Indians like Owl Woman (William Bent's wife), and their culturally mixed daughters shaped the course of events in the communities and nations to which they belonged.

In addition to emphasizing female actors, the author's ethnohistorical treatment of the Southern Cheyennes and Kiowas contextualizes the central roles that Southern Plains tribes played in Bent's sophisticated but precarious trade network. "Despite the firm's general profitability," Beyreis explains, "Bent, St. Vrain and Company was never the master of its own destiny" (47) because Indigenous politics and ecological phenomena usually dictated the course of regional events. While this focus on social, cultural, and gender history demonstrates some of the complexities of doing business on the western frontier, the general absence of economic analysis leaves out a significant part of the story that also helps to explain the rise and fall of this financial empire. National economic crises in the late 1830s and late 1850s, for instance, receive little treatment in this volume, nor does the concept of merchant capitalism play meaningfully into the analytical framework.

Although the Bent Family had two main branches—William was closely oriented to Cheyenne society while Charles integrated into northern New [End Page 348] Mexico's Hispano community—the book focuses more on the former than the latter. Part of this is explained by the availability of source material, but an effect of such unequal treatment is a sense that one side of the family was more historically prominent than the other. Whereas William comes across in a generally positive light, marrying a Southern Cheyenne woman and embracing certain tribal customs, Charles emerges as a deeply flawed character. A veritable misfit in Nnuevomexicano society, he cohabited with but did not marry the aforementioned Jaramillo, bribed insiders and conspired with outsiders as caprice dictated, and sometimes even spoke his racist mind. As the author points out in the conclusion, Charles Bent remains a controversial figure in New Mexico. Some still see him as a martyr, while many others believe that he got what he deserved on that fateful night in January 1847 when angry Taos residents killed and scalped him before dragging his corpse through the streets of town. The fact that one brother perished prematurely in a horrific act of corporeal mutilation while the other succumbed to natural causes two decades later speaks to the complexities and controversies surrounding outsider assimilation into these borderlands societies.

Well-researched and well-written, Blood in the Borderlands is a very readable account of the Bent Family. The...

审核人：

• 戴维·C·贝里斯（David C. Beyreis），1821-1920年，《边境地区的鲜血：冲突，亲属关系和弯曲的家庭》
• 威廉·S·凯泽

本特人跻身19世纪美国西部最著名的家庭之列，这本书展示了威廉和查尔斯兄弟以及他们的妻子和混血儿子女如何在该地区的社会和文化体系中游刃有余。戴维·贝里斯（David Beyreis）将亲属关系作为分析框架，认为“家庭关系和联盟网络的建立帮助Bents成为了非常成功的商人”（1）。声称先前有关西方边界的书籍“过分强调稳定和文化间的适应”（2），作者还着重强调了冲突和暴力在塑造地区事务中的作用。

弯曲的家庭成员提供了令人信服的案例研究，因为他们参加了许多前沿性的边境事件和过程，包括皮草贸易，圣达菲贸易，墨西哥土地赠予，德克萨斯州立法院，美国在1846年入侵新墨西哥州，印度条约委员会，美国陆军战役，1859年派克峰淘金热，沙溪大屠杀，道威法案和印度寄宿学校。这些主题中的每一个都受到了学术界的广泛关注，但是Beyreis以独特的方式将它们联系在一起，他的准传记着重于一个家庭。值得注意的是，这种方法允许作者将女性置于叙事的中心。读者将清楚地了解西班牙裔如玛丽亚·伊格纳西亚·贾拉米略（Charles Bent的搭档），印第安人如猫头鹰女人（威廉·本特的妻子），

除了强调女性演员外，作者对夏安南部和基奥瓦州的民族历史处理也体现了南部平原部落在本特复杂而sophisticated可危的贸易网络​​中所发挥的核心作用。Beyreis解释说：“尽管公司具有一般的盈利能力，但Bent，St。Vrain和Company从来都不是自己命运的主人”（47），因为土著政治和生态现象通常决定了区域事件的进程。虽然这种对社会，文化和性别历史的关注表明了在西方边境开展业务的某些复杂性，但总体上缺乏经济分析，却使故事的重要部分遗漏了，这也有助于解释这种金融的兴衰。帝国。

尽管本特家族有两个主要分支机构-威廉与夏安社会紧密相关，而查尔斯融入了北部的[ New New End [348]]墨西哥的西班牙裔社区，但该书更侧重于前者而不是后者。部分原因可以通过使用原始资料来解释，但是这种不平等待遇的影响是，从某种意义上说，家庭的一方在历史上比另一方更为突出。威廉以一般积极的态度面对面，嫁给了一名南部的夏安女人，并拥护一定的部落风俗，而查尔斯却成为一个严重缺陷的人物。Nnuevomexicano的名副其实的不合时宜在社会上，他同上述的贾拉米略同居，但没有结婚，他随心所欲地贿赂了内部人员，并与外部人员密谋，有时甚至说出了他的种族主义思想。正如作者在结论中指出的那样，查尔斯·本特在新墨西哥州仍然是一个有争议的人物。有些人仍然将他视为烈士，而其他许多人则认为，他在1847年1月那一个决定性的夜晚得到了他应得的东西，当时愤怒的陶斯居民在将他的尸体拖到城镇的街道上之前杀死了他并给他剥了皮。二十年后，一个兄弟因残酷的残酷残杀而过早地死去，而另一个则屈服于自然，这一事实在二十年后的事实说明了这些边界国社会的局外人同化的复杂性和争议。

经过精心研究和撰写的《无主之地的鲜血》是本特家族的易读作品。这...