'The deed of gift': Borderland encounters, landscape change, and the 'many deeds of war' in the Hudson-Champlain Corridor, 1690-1791

This dissertation examines the history of the Hudson-Champlain Corridor from Amerindian control to its incorporation into the American nation-state. Building from advances in frontier and environmental historiographies---including the conception of frontiers as permeable zones of contact between cultures---I focus attention on a region that was a theater of military operations during three international wars (King George's War, the French and Indian War, and the Revolutionary War). In this study, the evolving landscape functions as a lens through which to view conflicts and negotiations over land use and land tenure, expressions of cultural difference and adaptation, and the aims and consequences of military campaigns. The conduct of these wars has been underemphasized in frontier history, necessitating revision of the influential model of "borderlands to borders" of Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron. Military ecology---the study of the interplay between officers' decisions, soldiers' experiences, and the landscape---helps to better understand the impact of war on frontier settlement and bordering in a specific region.;This dissertation argues that because of the contingencies of wars and the autonomy of peoples-in-between, the Hudson-Champlain Corridor remained a borderland through most of the eighteenth century. The British Army's campaigns during the French and Indian War were predicated on obtaining knowledge of the land and assigning a role for soldiers in the postwar settlement on the region. British conquest largely displaced Native American tribes and intercultural mediators who had maintained the corridor as a region for diplomacy and illicit commerce between empires in the first half of the eighteenth century. Despite the conquest of New France, this region remained a borderland with local pockets of Anglo-American settlers assuming the role of peoples-in-between. When the Revolutionary War commenced twelve years later, the corridor was a chaotic region with ineffective official oversight of land use and land tenure. Wartime creative destruction---characterized by the determination of British and American officials to destroy roads and farms in retreat and expropriate the properties of enemy combatants in victory---helped settle longstanding frontier conflicts, shaping the creation of borders between Vermont and New York, and the United States and Canada.