Joseph N. Nicollet and Great Plains Ethnohistory: Interfaces among Nineteenth-Century French Science, Enlightenment, and Revolution

AbstractJoseph Nicollet’s 1838 and 1839 expeditions through the northeastern Great Plains provided a baseline for later interdisciplinary historical and scientific investigations. The life and times of French natural scientist and cartographer Joseph Nicolas Nicollet (1786-1843) coincided with the Enlightenment and with the revolution of 1830. Both historical events figured prominently in Nicollet’s Great Plains ethnohistorical narratives. As Withers and Livingstone (1999:4) posit in their “Introduction” to Geography and Enlightenment, “Far from simply being understood as a European movement with particular national expression, it becomes possible to conceive of the Enlightenment as being sited, produced, debated, and contested in local spaces and circumstances as well as being apparent at national levels.” Examples drawn from northeastern Great Plains ethnohistory serve to clarify this point. “Historians of anthropology who see the early nineteenth century as barren of ethnological insight are a bit hast...