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mattered and motivated. Access to guns did not start King Philip’s War, but many of Philip’s eventual allies joined his cause when the English tried to restrict that access. Philip lost, Silverman argues, when the Mohawks pushed Philip’s forces away from arms suppliers on the Hudson River. In this case, the gun frontier broke down as alternative sources of powder and lead dried up. In most of Silverman’s narratives, especially chapters 4 and 6 on Pontiac’s War and the Seminole Wars in Florida, he shows how Indians creatively manipulated the gun frontier to maintain arms supplies. Indians did not lose their wars because they lacked guns or powder, but because they were swamped by European demographic expansion and crippled by disease. In this respect, chapter 5, on the international gun frontier created by Chinese demand for sea otter pelts from the Pacific Northwest, is a bit of an outlier. Various European nations competed to supply guns in exchange for pelts and in doing so empowered one group over others. In this case, overhunting sea otters sparked the relatively rapid collapse of the gun frontier. The final two chapters move to the midcontinent and the penetration of the gun frontier well in advance of a significant European presence. Again, the story is one of differential access—often through Indian middlemen—and at least temporary empowerment. This is a remarkable book with a remarkably consistent story. In each case Silverman successfully marshals evidence showing how the prioritization of guns and powder drove Indian decisions and set up one people or another to become a regional power—at least for a while. This may be the one problem with his argument. He repeatedly argues that Indians controlled this process, but each chapter includes one group or another that is decimated by it. They were often decimated by other Indians or Indians allied with Europeans, but the cascading effect was destructive in the end. Well written and sustained by a wide evidence base, this bookwill force readers to reevaluate the significance of military activity and technology in shaping the fate of North American Indians.