Author: Fred R. Gowans
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Frontier and pioneer life
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Author: John E. Sunder
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806125664
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
"By beginning where the standard works leave off and carrying the story up to its logical conclusion in 1865, this book fills a definite void in the history of the fur trade in the American West. Set in the upper Missouri country, which was bypassed by settlement until the 1860s, it focuses primarily upon the St. Louis firm of Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and Company, usually known as the American Fur Company....This is not the distorted and romanticized approach so typical of much of the literature on the earlier fur trade. Drama is inherent, but it is sound, well-conceived, carefully documented history."-American Historical Review

Author: John G. Lepley
Publisher: Pictorial Histories Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781575101064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Author: Charles Larpenteur
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Frontier and pioneer life
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description

Author: Paul R. Wylie
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806155574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
On the morning of January 23, 1870, troops of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry attacked a Piegan Indian village on the Marias River in Montana Territory, killing many more than the army’s count of 173, most of them women, children, and old men. The village was afflicted with smallpox. Worse, it was the wrong encampment. Intended as a retaliation against Mountain Chief’s renegade band, the massacre sparked public outrage when news sources revealed that the battalion had attacked Heavy Runner’s innocent village—and that guides had told its inebriated commander, Major Eugene Baker, he was on the wrong trail, but he struck anyway. Remembered as one of the most heinous incidents of the Indian Wars, the Baker Massacre has often been overshadowed by the better-known Battle of the Little Bighorn and has never received full treatment until now. Author Paul R. Wylie plumbs the history of Euro-American involvement with the Piegans, who were members of the Blackfeet Confederacy. His research shows the tribe was trading furs for whiskey with the Hudson’s Bay Company before Meriwether Lewis encountered them in 1806. As American fur traders and trappers moved into the region, the U.S. government soon followed, making treaties it did not honor. When the gold rush started in the 1860s and the U.S. Army arrived, pressure from Montana citizens to control the Piegans and make the territory safe led Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan to send Baker and the 2nd Cavalry, with tragic consequences. Although these generals sought to dictate press coverage thereafter, news of the cruelty of the killings appeared in the New York Times, which called the massacre “a more shocking affair than the sacking of Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita” two years earlier. While other scholars have written about the Baker Massacre in related contexts, Blood on the Marias gives this infamous event the definitive treatment it deserves. Baker’s inept command lit the spark of violence, but decades of tension between Piegans and whites set the stage for a brutal and too-often-forgotten incident.

Author: Rudolf Friedrich Kurz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Artists
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
After trying many stratagems to remove the elephant in Duck's garden, Bear and Duck discover that the simplest approach is sometimes best.

Author: Rudolph Friedrich Kurz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fur trade
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description

Author: Charles Larpenteur
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781545335895
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri immerses the reader in the life of a merchant in the Missouri River from the 1830s to the early 1870s. An autobiographical chronicle which sheds a light into a period and profession of history often ignored in the modern day, Forty Years a Fur Trader is an illuminating and lively chronicle of Charles Larpenteur's career as a fur seller. A man of tough resolve and hardy constitution, Larpenteur condenses his many years traversing the Missouri wilderness and trading posts into a series of episodic highlights, chronologically arranged. The Missouri River and Rocky Mountains were, at the time, dangerous but potentially lucrative proposition for a trader to undertake. Rough terrain, numerous wild animals, and the presence of Native American tribes made life as a fur trader unpredictable and fraught with danger. Yet a good set of high quality pelts would fetch high sums, demand being high especially for animals whose fur had scarcely before seen market. Through Larpenteur's authentic recollections, obtained from notes and diary entries penned through his life, we gain an impression of the characters populating the Western frontier. The fur companies, formed from bands of hunters seeking to work together and split the proceeds, for decades saw a lively and competitive existence. Encounters with the Native Americans, whose chieftains generally commanded respect, are also mentioned. An enterprising soul, Larpenteur would take risks in pursuit of sales. One encounter, wherein he presents an Native American tribe with 'fire-water' (alcoholic spirit). In the euphoric atmosphere which followed, the tribe purchases his stock of 150 robes. A sudden rush of cold weather shortly afterwards sees the entire group, and Larpenteur himself, thankful for being well-equipped.

Author: Charles Larpenteur
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781511570404
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
This is a history of fur trading in the North American colonial period, which was often carried out by French settlers and Native Americans. From the intro: "The history of the West is still largely the story of discovery, exploration, survey, colonization, and the like; for aught else is of comparatively recent development-is contemporaneous, or nearly such. The bison was the original engineer, who followed the lay of the land and the run of the water; the Indian followed the bison; the white man followed the Indian; the gun and trap, the pick and shovel, the whiskey-jug, plow, and locomotive followed the white man, at little if any interval: this is the order of empire westward. Every step of this succession is of absorbing interest and momentous consequence; perhaps none more so than those taken during what I may style the picturesque period, when the plain was furrowed not by the plow but by the hoof of the bison, when no Indian war-whoop had been silenced by a steam-whistle, when the trapper and trader were romantic figures in scenes untamed to more prosaic industries. Such times as these call for chroniclers; and it is the purpose of the American Explorer Series, of which the present volumes form a continuation, to traverse this historic ground, perhaps to cultivate some corners of this fruitful field. What results may be expected are instanced in the case of the Journal of Jacob Fowler, with which the series began. Whoever heard of it, or of its author, till this year of grace 1898? A floating paragraph in one or two not well-known books was to the vague effect that a trader named Glenn took a party to Santa Fe in 1822-that was all. Now we have the narrative of that enterprise, complete in every detail, in an authentic, genuine, original, contemporaneous human document-and of such is the kingdom of history. Few persons now living may measure the full importance of the Fur Trade as a factor in the development of what has been called the " wild and woolly-West "-thereby giving occasion for Lummis' witty retort upon a " tame and cottony East." Fewer still can be aware of what iniquities and atrocities the seamy side of that indispensable industry reveals. Those who have read the Journals of Alexander Henry and David Thompson have had their eyes opened to the systematic swindling and debauching of Indians which characterized the traffic as conducted in Canada and some portions of the United States, and may readily believe that the pursuit of pelf in pelt was always tarred with the same stick. This identical subject-intrinsically important, in some respects repellent, never failing of tragic interest, albeit sordid and squalid-is continued in the autobiography of Charles Larpenteur. As Fowler's Journal and Fowler himself were until this year, so have Larpenteur and his narrative been hitherto-unknown. The latter, like the former, will be found composed of the very fiber that goes to the web of history. It is a notable and entirely novel contribution to our knowledge of the Fur Trade of the Upper Missouri for a period of more than an average lifetime, by one who lived the life and worked his way through it, from the position of a mere hand to that of one of its heads. Among other conclusions we may draw from this narrative, it would appear that the unpalliated and unmitigated evils were inherent in the system of traffic itself, red and white natures being what they respectively were; that there was a smoother than the seamy side of the business; that a good, kindly man might be about it, and die poor but honest; and that it called out some of the best as well as the worst of human qualities-some of the most manly, even heroic, traits, remote from cupidity and cruelty."

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description