To argue that the Fort Clark artistic output was a product of the Middle Ground is to borrow from historians. The concept of the Middle Ground was first articulated by historian Richard White in his 1991 book The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815.[4] White coined the term Middle Ground to name the co-created “single field of action” that he found in the geographic region of the French-controlled and administered pays d’en haut that extended over the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, then south to the Ohio River.[5] Neither the resident French nor Native peoples dominated or controlled the region. Instead, various actors developed and relied on a Middle Ground “in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the non-state world of [Native] villages” in order to form alliances as needed.[6] The resulting system of trade was built on the shared field between cultural systems, one that was co-created by Native and non-Native peoples.
Co-creation grants agency to both Native and European players in the French fur trade.[7] Both sets of players operated out of their own interests; both had to convince contingents of the other side to join with them in moments of political, social, or military struggle. To be successful, this convincing took on the linguistic and cultural languages of potential allies. New cultural practices and meanings arose out of “creative misunderstandings,” as groups misinterpreted the beliefs and customs of those they approached. These new practices and meanings became the co-created substratum of the Middle Ground.[8]
The exchange of people, mores, customs, and things cemented these appeals and their built alliances. White lays out a complex array of pays d’en haut practices that would have involved the exchange of material culture.[9] Native peoples received access to gunsmiths, blacksmiths, and missionaries, and they were regularly given presents and peace medals. French officers, trappers, and traders participated in calumet ceremonies, war feasts, “eat all” feasts, the giving of war belts, the accepting of the hatchet, war dances, the advancing of war bundles, and various ritual ceremonies, including those of mourning and covering the dead; some even sang their own war songs. These practices bound the many diverse populations of the pays d’en haut together, part of the conscious and visible framework by which peace, alliance, exchange, and free movement were achieved and maintained throughout French (and later British) North America.[10]
Many practices of the pays d’en haut appear in Wied-Neuwied’s Tagebücher, his daily logbooks of his two years of North American travels. These entries evidence the extension of the Middle Ground along the Missouri River, well into the nineteenth-century American expansionist period.[11] Fur traders married Native women, adopted Native children, and maintained lodges in Native villages; forts housed and fed Native guests, regularly held gift-giving ceremonies, and were policed by rotations of Native warriors.[12] All of these elements testify to two sides locked together in a relationship, as each group redefined their institutions and behaviors to accommodate the other. One of the tools for holding these relationships together was a ceremonial smoking pipe known to the French as the calumet.