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RANGERS' CHOICE
These books are recommended by employees of Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site
The Great Northwest Fur Trade: A Material Culture, 1763-1850 by Ryan Gale.
(Track of the Wolf, 2009) $33.00
The book is a comprehensive look at the material culture of the fur trade. This book deals primarily with the Canadian fur trade but also the American trade around the Great Lakes. Gale uses high quality images as well as written first-hand accounts. The pictures of material items of the fur trade are in color and are interspersed with drawings and paintings of scenes by period artists. Gale's book is informative, entertaining, and visually appealing. It would be a good book for both the general reader
and the history enthusiast. Topics discussed include Native Americans, the trade, transportation, the voyagers, the officers, diet and health, the forts, winter, and conflict.
Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith
(Nebraska Press, 2009) $40.00
This book is a collection of essays by scholars on a variety of aspects of the fur trade. The essays show how the role of Native Americans was far more instrumental in the conduct and outcome of the fur trade than previously suggested.
Fort Buford: Sentinel at the
Confluence, by Carla Kelly (Fort Union Association, 2009). $10.95.
This is a site handbook, both a chronological and topical overview history of the 19th century military post at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers. Fort Buford, active from 1866-1895, was built to help police the Sioux and their tribal allies. Kelly details life at the post, commanding officers, building construction, everyday life of the enlisted man, army dependents, as well as the larger story of the military dealing with Sioux resistance to white encroachment. The book is greatly enhanced by Fort Buford photographs and a map supplied by the State Historical Society of North Dakota.
Twilight of the Upper Missouri River Fur Trade: The Journals of Henry A. Boller, edited by W. Raymond Wood (State Historical Society of North Dakota, 2008) $21.95
An eyewitness to the rapidly changing world of the upper Missouri River, young Boller's journals and letters bring to life the declining days of the fur trade on the Northern Plains. His contemporary accounts of the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikara in the last years before their removal to reservation lands highlight a world undergoing profound change.
Navigating the Missouri: Steamboating on Nature's Highway, 1819-1935, by William E. Lass. (Arthur H. Clark, 2008) $45.00
The complete and colorful saga of steamboating on the Missouri River is told from its 1819 inception to the removal of the last commercial steamer in 1935. William E. Lass has crafted an engagingly written account that provides a history of transportation into and through the West - a story of the fur trade, of Indian-white relations, and of Euro-American settlement and development.
Updated 01/03/10