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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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"The explosive true saga of the legendary adventurer Jedediah Smith and the Mountain Men who explored the American frontier, written by New York Times bestselling authors of Blood and Treasure Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. It is the early 19th century, and the land recently purchased by President Thomas Jefferson stretches west for thousands of miles. Who inhabits this vast new garden of Eden? What strange beasts and natural formations can be found? Thus...
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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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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...