Johnny Grant (1833-1907), Metis, fur trader, rancher, and Riel-Resistance participant, documented his historical experiences in the northwestern US and Canada.

The papers in this book focus on themes which have been near the centre of fur trade scholarship: the identification of Indian motivations; the degree to which Indians were discriminating consumers and creative participants; and the extent of Native dependency on the trade. Spanning the period from the seventeenth century up to and including the twentieth, with distinguished authors such as J. Arthur Ray and Toby Morantz, The Subarctic Fur Trade will help scholars become more fully aware of the issues concerned with Native economic history.

The fascinating biography, Madame Montour et son temps by Simone Vincens, is now available in English under the title of Madame Montour and the Fur Trade (1667-1752). This book, which gives a French perspective to events, is a beautifully written and thoroughly researched account of an extraordinary woman as well as a unique presentation of events leading up to the French and Indian War. The main theme of the book is the life of Isabelle Montour (1667-1752). This adventurous, self-reliant woman was the daughter of a French soldier and an Algonkin mother. The first third of her life was spent as a member of the French colony on the St. Lawrence River, the second third she lived on the fringes of French and Ottawan societies at the western outposts of Michilimackinac and Detroit, and the final third she lived as an Iroquois in the provinces of New York and Pennsylvania. Isabelle was fluent in several Indian languages as well as French and English; she became an influential interpreter-diplomat for the governors of New York and Pennsylvania. Much of her life was devoted to improving relations between Indians and Europeans. As Madame Montour’s extraordinary life unfolds, we learn about European-Indian relations during the century leading up to the French and Indian War. This well-referenced history, told with drama and detail, covers the French-Iroquois hostilities on the Saint Lawrence River, the fur-trade center at Fort Michilimackinac, the political turmoil at Detroit, the immigration of western tribes into New York province, and the growing conflict between Pennsylvania merchants and French soldiers in the Ohio Valley. Isabelle Montour was involved in all these events.

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.

The years from the fall of New France in 1763 to the amalgamation of the Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company in 1821 were marked by fierce competition in the fur trade. Traders from the warring companies pushed west, undertaking incredible voyages in their search for new sources of furs. Irene Gordon explores the eventful lives of those who worked in the trade, including Alexander Henry the Elder, a trader and merchant who left a vivid written account of his experiences; Net-no-kwa, a woman of the Ottawa tribe who was so highly regarded by the traders at Michilimackinac that they saluted her with gunfire every time she arrived there; and the bold and flamboyant Scotsman Colin Robertson, who used "glittering pomposity" to impress those he dealt with. From chief factors to servants, independent traders, Native trappers and Metis, the people of the fur trade left an indelible imprint on North American history.

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.

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.

This analysis of the fur trade carried on by the Hudson's Bay Company and its competitors in northern Canada from 1870 to 1945 includes material on its relations with Indians, the state of the fur market, activities of the Department of Indian Affairs, and details of othertrading companies such as Lamson and Hubbard, Northern Trading Company and Revillon Freres.