"Great Lakes Creoles" provides an excellent account of the social, political and cultural history of the inhabitants of Prairie du Chien, from New France to their annexation into a growing American Empire. Lucy Eldersveld Murphy offers significant information on an understudied region and people, thus providing the reader fantastic insight as a starting point for further study.

Major strengths of this work include the emphasis on demographic changes through censuses, and the changes to social, cultural and political realities over the century. Furthermore, through comparisons with the Mexicans in the American Southwest and the Western Métis in the Canadian Northwest, including the similarities and differences between their experiences, Murphy presents an interregional analysis of colonized peoples in North America.

A weakness in her work, however, is her choice of terminology. Murphy chooses to use the term "Creole" to refer to the inhabitants of this community. She explains that she wants to avoid using the term "Métis", a term that the people of the time did not use to describe themselves. While this explanation seems to make sense, the common term in use across upper New France was "Canadien", which Murphy appears to avoid using due to political associations of the term with the modern Canadian State. Her choice to describe the population as "Creole", a term they did not use to describe themselves, in lieu of Canadien, makes it difficult to accept her reasoning for avoiding the term "Métis".

Vocabulary choices notwithstanding, this is a fantastic work, and highly recommended for any reader interested in the social and cultural history of North America from a postcolonial and interregional lens. ( )