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A detailed and perceptive account of the fur trade seen through the eyes of a teenaged boy.
As fur traders were driven across northern North America by economic motivations, the landscape over which they plied their trade was punctuated by sound: shouting, singing, dancing, gunpowder, rattles, jingles, drums, fiddles, and – very occasionally – bagpipes. Fur trade interactions were, in a word, noisy. Daniel Laxer unearths traces of music, performance, and other intangible cultural phenomena long since silenced, allowing us to hear the fur trade for the first time. Listening to the Fur Trade uses the written record, oral history, and material culture to reveal histories of sound and music in an era before sound recording. The trading post was a noisy nexus, populated by a polyglot crowd of highly mobile people from different national, linguistic, religious, cultural, and class backgrounds. They found ways to interact every time they met, and facilitating material interests and survival went beyond the simple exchange of goods. Trust and good relations often entailed gift-giving: reciprocity was performed with dances, songs, and firearm salutes. Indigenous protocols of ceremony and treaty-making were widely adopted by fur traders, who supplied materials and technologies that sometimes changed how these ceremonies sounded. Within trading companies, masters and servants were on opposite ends of the social ladder but shared songs in the canoes and lively dances during the long winters at the trading posts. While the fur trade was propelled by economic and political interests, Listening to the Fur Trade uncovers the songs and ceremonies of First Nations people, the paddling songs of the voyageurs, and the fiddle music and step-dancing at the trading posts that provided its pulse.
A Seattle Times selection for one of Best Non-Fiction Books of 2010 Winner of the New England Historial Association's 2010 James P. Hanlan Award Winner of the Outdoor Writers Association of America 2011 Excellence in Craft Award, Book Division, First Place "A compelling and well-annotated tale of greed, slaughter and geopolitics." —Los Angeles Times As Henry Hudson sailed up the broad river that would one day bear his name, he grew concerned that his Dutch patrons would be disappointed in his failure to find the fabled route to the Orient. What became immediately apparent, however, from the Indians clad in deer skins and "good furs" was that Hudson had discovered something just as tantalizing. The news of Hudson's 1609 voyage to America ignited a fierce competition to lay claim to this uncharted continent, teeming with untapped natural resources. The result was the creation of an American fur trade, which fostered economic rivalries and fueled wars among the European powers, and later between the United States and Great Britain, as North America became a battleground for colonization and imperial aspirations. In Fur, Fortune, and Empire, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade of old, when the rallying cry was "get the furs while they last." Beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were slaughtered, used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. To read Fur, Fortune, and Empire then is to understand how North America was explored, exploited, and settled, while its native Indians were alternately enriched and exploited by the trade. As Dolin demonstrates, fur, both an economic elixir and an agent of destruction, became inextricably linked to many key events in American history, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, as well as to the relentless pull of Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West. This work provides an international cast beyond the scope of any Hollywood epic, including Thomas Morton, the rabble-rouser who infuriated the Pilgrims by trading guns with the Indians; British explorer Captain James Cook, whose discovery in the Pacific Northwest helped launch America's China trade; Thomas Jefferson who dreamed of expanding the fur trade beyond the Mississippi; America's first multimillionaire John Jacob Astor, who built a fortune on a foundation of fur; and intrepid mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith, who sliced their way through an awe inspiring and unforgiving landscape, leaving behind a mythic legacy still resonates today. Concluding with the virtual extinction of the buffalo in the late 1800s, Fur, Fortune, and Empire is an epic history that brings to vivid life three hundred years of the American experience, conclusively demonstrating that the fur trade played a seminal role in creating the nation we are today.
In 1528, the Spanish explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions were shipwrecked and, looking for help, began an eight-year trek through the deserts of the American West. Over three centuries later, the four "Great Surveys" in the United States were consolidated into the U.S. Geological Survey. The frontiers were the lands near or beyond the recognized international, national, regional, or tribal borders. Over the centuries, they hosted a complicated series of international explorations of lands inhabited by American Indians, Spanish, French-Canadians, British, and Americans. These explorations were undertaken for wide-ranging reasons including geographical, scientific, artistic-literary, and for the growth of the railroad. This history covers over 350 years of exploration of the West.
Born in 1833 at Fort Edmonton, Johnny Grant experienced and wrote about many historical events in the Canada-US northwest, and died within sight of the same fort in 1907. Grant was not only a fur trader; he was instrumental in early ranching efforts in Montana and played a pivotal role in the Riel Resistance of 1869-70. Published in its entirety for the first time, Grant's memoir-with a perceptive introduction by Gerhard Ens-is an indispensable primary source for the shelves of fur trade and Métis historians.
Through a detailed analysis of their unique occupational culture, Making the Voyageur World reexamines the French Canadian workers who dominated the fur trade industry and became iconic images of North American lore.
A history of the North American fur trade, based on primary sources. The North American fur trade, set in motion by the discovery of the New World in the fifteenth century, was this continent's biggest business for over three hundred years. Furs harvested by Ojibwa natives in the north woods ended up on the sleeves and hems of French princesses and Chinese emperors. Felt hats on the heads of every European businessman began as beaver pelts carried in birchbark canoes to trading posts dotting the wilderness. Iron tools, woolen blankets, and calico cloth manufactured in England found their way to wigwams along the remote rivers of North America. The fur trade influenced every aspect of life—from how Europeans related to the Indians, how and where settlements were built, to how our nation formed. Drawing on primary sources, including the diaries of Ojibwa, American, and French traders of the period, this Society of School Librarians International Honor Book gives readers a glimpse of a little-known story from our past.
In the late 18th century, the vast land that lay west of the Mississippi River beckoned to daring frontiersmen, who produced the first major industry of the American West--the challenging, often dangerous fur trade. Stan Hoig provides an intimate look into the lives of four generations of the Chouteau family as they voyaged up the Western rivers to conduct trade.
During the first half of the 19th century, a unique subculture built around hunting and mobility existed quietly in the Pacific Northwest. Descendants of European or Canadian fathers and Native American mothers, these mixed-blood settlers?called M(c)tis?were pivotal to the development of the Oregon Country, but have been generally neglected in its written history. Today we know them by the names they left on the land and the waters: The Dalles, Deschutes, Grand Ronde, Portneuf, Payette; and on the peoples who lived there: Pend Oreille, Coeur d Alene, Nez Perce. John C. Jackson's Children of the Fur Trade recovers a vital part of Northwest history and gives readers a vivid and memorable portrait of M(c)tis life at the western edge of North America. This informal account shows the M(c)tis as explorers and mapmakers, as fur trappers and traders, and as boatmen and travelers in a vanishing landscape. Because of their mixed race, they were forced into the margin between cultures in collision. Often disparaged as half-breeds, they became links between the dispossessed native peoples and the new order of pioneer settlement.Meet the independently minded Jacco Finlay, the beautiful Helene McDonald, fearsome Tom McKay and the bear-fighting Iroquois Ignace Hatchiorauquasha, whose M(c)tisse wife, Madame Gray, charmed lonely fur traders. Here is the rawhide knot of the mountain men who brought their Indian wives to suffer the censure of missionaries while building a community where their mixed-blood children were no longer welcome. A riveting glimpse into a unique heritage, illustrated with historic maps, drawings, and photographs, this book will interest and inform both the scholar and the general reader.
Among the most dynamic Aboriginal peoples in western Canada today are the Ojibwa, who have played an especially vital role in the development of an Aboriginal political voice at both levels of government. Yet, they are relative newcomers to the region, occupying the parkland and prairies only since the end of the 18th century. This work traces the origins of the western Ojibwa, their adaptations to the West, and the ways in which they have coped with the many challenges they faced in the first century of their history in that region, between 1780 and 1870. The western Ojibwa are descendants of Ojibwa who migrated from around the Great Lakes in the late 18th century. This was an era of dramatic change. Between 1780 and 1870, they survived waves of epidemic disease, the rise and decline of the fur trade, the depletion of game, the founding of non-Native settlement, the loss of tribal lands, and the government's assertion of political control over them. As a people who emerged, adapted, and survived in a climate of change, the western Ojibwa demonstrate both the effects of historic forces that acted upon Native peoples, and the spirit, determination, and adaptive strategies that the Native people have used to cope with those forces. This study examines the emergence of the western Ojibwa within this context, seeing both the cultural changes that they chose to make and the continuity within their culture as responses to historical pressures. The Ojibwa of Western Canada differs from earlier works by focussing closely on the details of western Ojibwa history in the crucial century of their emergence. It is based on documents to which pioneering scholars did not have access, including fur traders' and missionaries' journals, letters, and reminiscences. Ethnographic and archaeological data, and the evidence of material culture and photographic and art images, are also examined in this well-researched and clearly written history.