From the fall of Cahokia in the early fourteenth century to the ascendancy of the young United States in the early nineteenth century, Jacob Lee reinterprets the history of early North America by tracing the key role major midcontinental rivers and social networks played in linking Indian nations and European empires in a long, shared history of conquest and resistance. Long before Europeans set foot on the shores of North America, Siouan peoples from the Great Plains, Algonquians from the Great Lakes, and Muskhogeans from the South traded with and fought each other in the heart of the midcontinent. Starting in the early 1600s, the Illinois became the dominant power in the region, constructing a network of allies that stretched from Lake Superior to Arkansas. They were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers, Jolliet and Marquette, appeared in the region. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the major empires in North American history--France, Britain, Spain, and the US--claimed part or all of the region. When Americans came on the scene and began to remake the midcontinent, they overturned the patterns of 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans.--