Catalog Search Results
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American exploration and travel volume 44
Summary
In 1811 a group of American traders built a fort at the mouth of the Columbia River, named Fort Astoria in honour of its financier, John Jacob Astor. Envisioned as the spur of a fur-trading empire, by 1813 the project was a business failure and the fort was surrendered to the British. But in its short life Astoria rendered incalculable benefits to public understanding of the Great Northwest. The exploration of trade routes, the description of various...
2) The voyageur
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"Nute's best-selling book portrays the indefatigable French-Canadian canoe men, whose labors were vital to the fur trade and whose influence reaches us through the colorful songs, place names, customs, and legends they left behind. This definitive account was first published in 1931."--Amazon.com pub. desc.
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Once again, New York Times and internationally best-selling author W. Michael Gear turns his master's hand to the frontier West. In the vein of his best-selling Coyote Summer, Gear now takes us to the 1812 Missouri Fur Trade. An intimate of the Burr conspiracy, the condemned and hounded John Tylor signs on as boatman with Manuel Lisa's expedition. But the river is now contested as the British, Spanish, and other fur companies prepare to break Lisa's...
4) Mountain man
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Tailored after the actual "Crow Killer" John Johnson, Sam Minard is a mountain man who seeks the freedom that the Rocky Mountains offers trappers. After his beloved Indian wife is murdered, Sam Minard becomes obsessed with vengeance, and his fortunes become intertwined with those of Kate Bowden, a widow who faces madness. This remarkable frontier fiction captures that brief season when the romantic myth of the far West became a fact.
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"In the early twentieth century, northerners lived and trapped in one of the world’s harshest environments. At a time when government services and social support were minimal or nonexistent, they thrived on the fox fur trade, relying on their energy, training, discipline, and skills. John R. Bockstoce, a leading scholar of the Arctic fur trade who also served as a member of an Eskimo whaling crew, explores the twentieth-century history of the Western...
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First mountain man volume 19
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When a trail drive led by freewheeling adventurer Wiley Courtland is attacked by an Indian war party led by the cunning Red Knife, Preacher, after an act of treachery opens the gates to a massacre, rises from the carnage and begins his war of revenge - alone.
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In this illuminating book, the Plains Indians come to life as shrewd traders. The Cheyennes played a vital role in an intricate and expanding barter system that connected tribes with each other and with whites. Joseph Jablow follows the Cheyennes, who by the beginning of the nineteenth century had migrated westward from their villages in present-day Minnesota into the heart of the Great Plains. Formerly horticulturists, they became nomadic hunters...
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March of America facsimile volume no. 069
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In the spring of 1831 a young Pennsylvanian, Zenas Leonard, embarked from St. Louis in a company of seventy men who had formed an expedition for the purpose of trapping furs and trading with the Indians in the Rocky Mountains. After four years of wandering which took him to the then strange land of Spanish California, he returned to his parental home in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, in the autumn of 1835, where he was greeted by his relatives as one returned...
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"Ten years have passed since Jack Picaro lost his Ghost Rifle--the firearm he invented, the one that never missed its target. The loss of the rifle calmed the hellraiser in his soul. Instead of returning to the gambling halls and whiskey bars of St. Louis, Jack has spent the last decade as a fur trapper in Wyoming's Wild River Range, married to Sky, the daughter of an Arikara war chief, and father of two. Then, after helping rescue U.S. soldiers trapped...
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Luke Ransom man of the mountains volume 1
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Luke Ransom was just eighteen years old when he answered an ad in a St. Louis newspaper that would change his life forever. The American Fur Company needed one-hundred enterprising men to travel up the Missouri River -- the longest in North America -- all the way to its source. They would hunt and trap furs for one, two, or three years. Along the way, they would face unimaginable hardships: grueling weather, wild animals, hunger, exhaustion, and hostile...
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Northwest of the World, first published in 1944, is the memoir of American explorer and fur-trader Olaf Swenson (1883-1938). The book chronicles his long career in Alaska and Siberia, and provides a fascinating look into the native culture of northeastern Siberia, as well as the difficulties - extreme cold, ships frozen in ice, nearly impossible travel conditions, and Soviet officials - faced by Swenson and his crews. Illustrated with 8 pages of photographs....
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A surprising and sweeping history that reveals the fur trade to be the driving force behind conquest, colonization, and revolution in early America
Combining the epic saga of Hampton Sides's Blood and Thunder with the natural history of Mark Kurlansky's Cod, popular historian Alan Axelrod reveals the astonishingly vital role a small animal-the beaver-played in the creation of our nation. The author masterfully relays a story often neglected by conventional...
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"With Masters and Servants, Scott P. Stephen has revealed startling truths about the men of the Hudson's Bay Company. Rather than dedicating themselves body and soul to the Company's interests, these workers hired out like domestic servants, joining a 'household' with its attendant norms of duty and loyalty. Through painstaking documentary research, Stephen shines welcome light on the lives of these largely overlooked historical actors. The household...
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Western Americana volume 0
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Ever wonder how everyone made it west? They used trails beaten by such men as Osborne Russell. In 1830, sixteen-year-old Russell left his farm in Maine and ran away to the sea. He didn't like it. He ended up joining an expedition headed to Oregon by way of the Rocky Mountains. Along the way, he acquired the skills necessary for survival. He also hunted buffalo and trapped beaver, looked for new trails west, and kept a journal that forms the basis...
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In 1779 a group of independent fur traders from Montreal banded together to form the North West Company; this was a trading expedient and no one could have foreseen its brilliant and far-reaching results. Before the North West Company name disappeared in a merger with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821, it had spanned the continent, reached the Arctic, and traded round the Horn to China. Many of the great rivers and lakes of the North and West carry...
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Indian trader, rancher, harbor developer, oil impresario, these are the many worlds of one of the least chronicled but most fascinating characters of the American West. In the early, bustling years of the frontier, a brazen young man named William McDole Lee moved from Wisconsin to Kansas and then to Texas to forge a life for himself. Becoming a driving entrepreneurial force in Texas's development, Lee soon garnered the alliances and resources necessary...
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"In September 1823, three men met at Rainy Lake House, a Hudson's Bay Company trading post near the Boundary Waters. Dr. John McLoughlin, the proprietor of Rainy Lake House, was in charge of the borderlands west of Lake Superior, where he was tasked with opposing the petty traders who operated out of US territory. Major Stephen H. Long, an officer in the US Army Topographical Engineers, was there on an expedition to explore the wooded borderlands...