Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South by Angela Pulley Hudson

(and also) along the roads. Hudson’s work focuses on different perceptions of the roads and paths that traversed the Creek Nation, and how they affected perceptions of the boundaries between the Nation and the new states that surrounded it. As such, it offers a new way to think about the settlement of the American South. The image of a unified Creek Nation standing, solidified, against the onslaught of America from the east is incorrect on at least two accounts: first, the Creek Nation was made up of smaller political units that rarely functioned as a unified Nation; second, the territory itself was not uniformly separated from settler lands—roads crisscrossed the territory. Furthermore, American expansionism was not always about settlement, and the sedentism that it suggests, but also about the desire for increased mobility. As Hudson notes, the federal roads through the Creek Nation were established to ease communication between parts of the nascent United States (Washington and New Orleans, for example). However, the roads were used by far more than letter carriers. Settlers and their REVIEWS