"Is the story of the American West inevitably a tale of violence and exploitation? Well, mostly, but not always, and the exceptions matter. In Peace and Friendship, Stephen Aron explores fascinating historical interludes of accommodation, convergence, and harmony among people at odds. Familiar characters and places, from Daniel Boone and Lewis and Clark to the Oregon Trail and Dodge City, are here, but we will never again see them the same way. Aron's unconventional view of the Western past may even help us imagine our way to a less traumatic future." -- Virginia Scharff, Distinguished Professor of History Emerita, University of New Mexico"Peace and Friendship is a brave book that stands apart in its focus on those moments of frontier compromise and comity (however fleeting) that have typically been overlooked or dismissed, especially since the emergence of the New Western History of the 1980s.ÂSteve Aron has deftly gathered a handful of famous and unfamiliar episodes'spanning an enormous stretch of time and space, from the Ohio Valley to the Great Plains to the Pacific Northwest'to tell a story that is more layered and complex than the now-standard narrative emphasizing relentless conquest and decline." -- Andrew R. Graybill, Professor of History and Director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University"Democracy, as Aron puts it, made demography destiny.

This gives his fine book a melancholy tone, a sense both of what might have been and of why it was unlikely to be." -- Elliott West, University of Arkansas"Aron rejects feel-good stories of peace and friendship like Disney's Pocahontas, which he calls "wishtories" and not history. But his history "does push into view times and places where people unexpectedly got along." And perhaps, he suggests, "they prompt us to ponder anew how we might, too."" - Trend and Tradition.