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(More customer reviews)This is a well written and engaging look into the importance of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indian villages as a pivotal point in trade systems during the late 1700's through early 1800's. Being located along the Missouri River in present day North Dakota, the Mandan/Hidatsa Indians traded horses, robes and furs to Canadian Fur Companies in return for guns and ammunition. They would then trade these goods for other commodities from various Northern Plains Indian Tribes, who previously may have traded with other tribes or the Spaniards further south. In part one, the authors give a lengthy but excellent and relevant chronological introduction as to the fur trade history of this geographical area. Part two includes five journals (or excerpts) of some of these Northwest Fur Company traders' first hand accounts depicting life as it was: John Macdonell's descriptions of the Indians, geography and trade in the 1790's; David Thompson's narrative describing his harrowing 1797 journey from Fort Assiniboine to the Mandan villages in the dead of winter; Larocque's two narratives, the "Missouri (1804)" and "Yellowstone (1805)" Journals, the latter of which, in the company with Crow Indians, he may possibly have been the first white man to descend the Yellowstone River, pre-dating William Clark by more than a year. The final narrative is of Charles McKenzie's four journeys to the Mandan villages (1804-1806), the first two in company with Larocque's expeditions. This is a fascinating read for fur trade enthusiasts and/or those whose interests are in early western exploration.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains: Canadian Traders Among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818 (American Exploration and Travel Series)
Long before their first contact with whites, the Mandan and Hidatsa villagers along the Missouri River in what is now central North Dakota had established a prosperous center for a vast intertribal trade network across the Northern Plains. Early white fur traders, learning of the existence of these villages, were quickly drawn to them.
French, British, and Canadian traders were the first to arrive. Representatives of the Montreal-based North West Company were soon followed to the Missouri by employees of the rival Hudson's Bay Company, and for nearly thirty years the two groups competed for the beaver pelts collected by the Mandans and Hidatsas from tribes farther west.
Contact with the Canadian traders, and later with others who ascended the Missouri from Saint Louis, had a profound effect on the tribes, for it introduced Euro-American culture and trade goods that led to the extinction of their way of life.
There is especially good documentation of the dealings between the Mandans and Hidatsas and the whites for the period 1790 to 1806, when several literate traders visited the Indian villages and recorded their experiences and impressions in lively, colorful narratives. In this book are presented new, dependable, annotated transcriptions of five of the most important of these documents, the narratives of the traders John Macdonell, David Thompson, François-Antoine Larocque (two journals), and Charles McKenzie. Through the narratives and the editors' own thorough historical introduction, W. Raymond Wood and Thomas D. Thiessen reexamine the history of the fur trade in the North and provide fresh insight into that shadowy period. New maps show in detail the routes of the trader-narrators, and the appendix provides useful statistics, inventories, and financial accounts of the fur trade of the era.
Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains will be of use not only to scholars of the fur trade and anthropologists but also to all those interested in the exploration and early history of the vast Northern Plains.
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