Download Free Fort Union And The Upper Missouri Fur Trade 1830 1865 Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Fort Union And The Upper Missouri Fur Trade 1830 1865 and write the review.

In this book, Barton Barbour presents the first comprehensive history of Fort Union, the nineteenth century's most important and longest-lived Upper Missouri River fur trading post. Barbour explores the economic, social, legal, cultural, and political significance of the fort which was the brainchild of Kenneth McKenzie and Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and a part of John Jacob Astor's fur trade empire. From 1830 to 1867, Fort Union symbolized the power of New York and St. Louis, and later, St. Paul merchants' capital in the West. The most lucrative post on the northern plains, Fort Union affected national relations with a number of native tribes, such as the Assiniboine, Cree, Crow, Sioux, and Blackfeet. It also influenced American interactions with Great Britain, whose powerful Hudson's Bay Company competed for Upper Missouri furs. Barbour shows how Indians, mixed-bloods, Hispanic-, African-, Anglo-, and other Euro-Americans living at Fort Union created a system of community law that helped maintain their unique frontier society. Many visiting artists and scientists produced a magnificent graphic and verbal record of events and people at the post, but the old-time world of fur traders and Indians collapsed during the Civil War when political winds shifted in favor of Lincoln's Republican Party. In 1865 Chouteau lost his trade license and sold Fort Union to new operators, who had little interest in maintaining the post's former culture. Barton H. Barbour is Professor of History at Boise State University and author of Jedidiah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
"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
Early in the nineteenth century, the mountain men emerged as a small but distinctive group whose knowledge and experience of the trans-Mississippi West extended the national consciousness to continental dimensions. Though Lewis and Clark blazed a narrow corridor of geographical reality, the West remained largely terra incognita until trappers and traders--Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Smith--opened paths through the snow-choked mountain wilderness. They opened the way west to Fremont and played a major role in the pivotal years of 1845-1848 when Texas was annexed, the Oregon question was decided, and the Mexican War ended with the Southwest and California in American hands, the Pacific Ocean becoming our western boundary.
Clay tobacco pipes are a unique form of artifact that has been recovered from the earliest colonial period sites to those of the early twentieth century. Archaeologists have found this artifact category useful for interpretive purposes due to their rapid technological and typological change, decoration, and maker's marks. Lack of adequate reporting in older site reports precludes a wide range of interpretive values intrinsic to this artifact category. A detailed study of tobacco pipe assemblages from the Pacific Northwest and Northern Plains, in an 1800 to 1890s time frame, demonstrates the interpretive value of this category on an intrasite, regional, and interregional basis. The detailed analysis given the pipes and pipe assemblages provides a historical background that encompasses the artifacts, the manufacturers, the sites, the relationships of the sites, and their place in the development of these regions. These tobacco pipes reflect the marketing and trade histories of these regions as well as many of the cultural subgroups.
"In stressing the exploitation and destruction of the physical and human environment rather than the usual frontier romanticism, David Wishart has provided for students of the trans-Mississippi fur trade a valuable service."--Journal of the Early Republic. A standard reference work [that] should be required reading for all students of the American west."--Pacific Historical Review. "The whole [fur trade] system is traced out from the Green River rendezvous or the Fort Union post to the trading houses of St. Louis and the auctions in New York and Europe. Such factors as capital formation, shifting commercial institutions, the role of advanced market information, and the nature, kinds, costs, and speed of transportation are all worked into the story, as is the relationship of the whole fur trade to national and international business cycles. This is an impressive achievement for a book so brief. . . . [It] opens out onto new methodological vistas and paradigms in western history."--William H. Goetzmann, New Mexico Historical Review David J. Wishart is a professor of geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize for distin-guished books in American geography, sponsored by the Association of American Geographers for An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians, also available from the University of Nebraska Press.