Forts Of The Upper Missouri

This book brings to life one of the most exciting eras in American history. In late 1819 Colonel Henry Atkinson led an expedition to explore the wilderness of the Upper Missouri and establish sites for a string of military posts, which would extend successful contacts with the Indians as well as exploit trade with British companies. The result of his efforts was a fort system which played a dramatic and significant role in the opening of the territories of the upper plains and the Rockies.

A thriving fur trade post between 1830 and 1860, Fort Clark, in what is today western North Dakota, also served as a way station for artists, scientists, missionaries, soldiers, and other western chroniclers traveling along the Upper Missouri River. The written and visual legacies of these visitors—among them the German prince-explorer Maximilian of Wied, Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, and American painter-author George Catlin—have long been the primary sources of information on the cultures of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, the peoples who met the first fur traders in the area. This book, by a team of anthropologists, is the first thorough account of the fur trade at Fort Clark to integrate new archaeological evidence with the historical record. The Mandans built a village in about 1822 near the site of what would become Fort Clark; after the 1837 smallpox epidemic that decimated them, the village was occupied by Arikaras until they abandoned it in 1862. Because it has never been plowed, the site of Fort Clark and the adjacent Mandan/Arikara village are rich in archaeological information. The authors describe the environmental and cultural setting of the fort (named after William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition), including the social profile of the fur traders who lived there. They also chronicle the histories of the Mandans and the Arikaras before and during the occupation of the post and the village. The authors conclude by assessing the results—published here for the first time—of the archaeological program that investigated the fort and adjacent Indian villages at Fort Clark State Historic Site. By vividly depicting the conflict and cooperation in and around the fort, this book reveals the various cultures’ interdependence.

Describes the customs and manners of five Missouri Indian tribes by the author who was a fur trader in Missouri for more than twenty years.

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.

Thirty years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark passed through the Mandan villages in present-day North Dakota, the Upper Missouri River region was being plied by fur traders. In 1834 Francis A. Chardon, a Philadelphian of French extraction, took charge of Fort Clark, a main post of the American Fur Company on the Upper Missouri. The journal that Chardon began that year offers a rare glimpse of daily life among the Mandan Indians, including the Arikaras, Yanktons, and Gros Ventres. In particular, it is a valuable and graphic record of the smallpox scourge that nearly destroyed the Mandans in 1837. Chardon describes much of historical interest, including such figures as the interpreter Charbonneau, Sacajawea's husband, and the fantastic James Dickson, "Liberator of all the Indians." By the time his account ends in 1839, the fur trade is already in decline. Chardon's journal was long lost, rediscovered, and finally edited and published in 1932 by Annie Heloise Abel, a distinguished scholar whose works, all available as Bison Books, included The American Indian As Slaveholder and Secessionist; The American Indian in the Civil War, 1862-1865; and The American Indian and the End of the Confederacy, 1863-1866. Her historical introduction provides background on the fur trade and on Chardon's life before and after his tenure at Fort Clark. William R. Swagerty is a history professor at the University of Idaho.