Lewis and Clark’s recommendations
calculate 1
North and South Dakota Boundary
To see labels, steer to the map .
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University
The Missouri River from the mod North Dakota-South Dakota limit and the Heart River, the “ heart ” of traditional Mandan nation. The river at upper left is labeled “ Chiss-chect roentgen ” in Clark ‘s hand ; the future southern conducive down the Missouri was besides crossed out by Clark .
figure 2
Heart River to Knife River
To see labels, detail to the map .
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University
The Missouri River from the Heart River to the Knife River, showing the localization of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages at the terminus of the more than 200-mile-long “ Mandan trail ” to the Qu’Appelle River used by canadian traders. The explanation of the “ Track o the Catepoi river ” —the Qu’Appelle ( “ who calls ? ” ) River—was written by James Mackay. “ village Chiss.chect ” and “ Wah hoo toon—Wind ” are in Clark ‘s hand .
human body 3
John Jacob Astor
From a trace by Pierre Morand ( 1842 ).
Half-tone plate engraved by C. W. Chadwick .
The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Vol LXVII, No. 6 ( April 1904 ) .
Astor, founder of the monopolistic american Fur Company in 1808, became America ‘s first millionaire. He began building his luck in the fur trade wind ( see Fig. 3 ). In 1816 he entered another lucrative market, selling turkish opium first to China and then to England. In the 1830s he turned his energies to very estate of the realm exploitation on Manhattan Island. After retirement he spent some of his wealth toward cultural interests, supporting John James Audubon, for exercise, and Edgar Allen Poe. At his death his fortune amounted to more than 20 million dollars, part of which was used to create what late became the New York Public Library .
calculate 4
The Steamer Yellow-Stone
on the 19th April 1833, after Karl Bodmer ( 1809-1893 )
Aquatint 44 x 60 curium ( 17¼ adam 23½ inches )
Courtesy Everett D. Graff Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago
Near Fire Prairie, just below what would become Fort Osage, the Yellow Stone was stopped by dangerous snags in the Missouri River that had to be sawed away, and the crew had to land separate of the cargo on land to help free the steamer. A far more placid river is depicted in Bodmer ‘s original watercolor .
figure 5
Astoria in 1813
Drawing by Harry Fenn after a sketch by Franchére, a clerk in Astor ‘s american Fur Company .
The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Vol LXVII, No. 6 ( April 1904 ) .
Astoria was John Jacob Astor ‘s fort at the talk of the Columbia River. It was built in 1811 to obtain furs for trade wind with China, but the War of 1812 forced the Astorians to sell the post to the british North West Company. Renamed Fort George, it was retained by the NWC until it merged with the Hudson ‘s Bay Company in 1821 .
figure 6
Old Fort Benton, 1855
John Ford Clymer ( 1907-1989 )
petroleum, 24 adam 36 inches, 1967
Courtesy of Mrs. John F. Clymer and the Clymber Museum of Art
An assortment of water craft casual vied for landing space on the waterfront at Fort Benton, the american Fur Company ‘s trade post situated on the Missouri between the mouth of the Marias River and the Falls. In the foreground a trapper and his indian wife, in a dugout canoe towing a loaded Indian-style taurus boat, paddle toward a berth among a cluster of other canoes. The elegant open gravy boat at center is a Mackinaw skiff. To the veracious of it are three proper keelboats, the major freighters of the trade until the first base steamboat arrived in 1860. For the next twenty years Fort Benton remained the uppermost river port and commercial center on the Missouri, more than 2,285 miles from St. Louis .
figure 7
Fort Union
On the Missouri
after Karl Bodmer ( 1809-1893 )
Aquatint, 44 adam 60 curium ( 17¼ adam 23½ in. )
Courtesy Everett D. Graff Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago
Fort Union was the principal deal post of the american Fur Company on the upper Missouri River. Built for the Assiniboine Indian craft in 1829 and 1830, it became the grandest of the company ‘s posts on the Missouri. It was the entirely one protected by stone bastions .
trope 8
by Frederic Remington ( 1861-1909 )
The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine Vol. 36, No. 6 ( October 1888 ), Courtesy of Denver Public Library
Dressed for a Rocky Mountain winter, this mountain man cradles a Hawken plunder, prized above all others in the West for its sturdiness and large quality. His packhorse carries its cargo balanced on a standard sawhorse packsaddle .
sometime in August of 1807 Meriwether Lewis penned a long essay that Nicholas Biddle published in the appendix to his 1814 paraphrase of the captains ‘ journals as “ Observations and reflections on the present and future state of matter of Upper Louisiana, in relation to the politics of the indian nations inhabiting that area, and the trade and intercourse with the lapp. ” It was an insightful comment on the conditions of barter during the early spanish regimen, and a signally accurate prediction of the future problems facing the new district. He foresaw that a chief malefic confronting the area would be subsistence hunt by whites on indian land, incidents, he predicted, that would be “ the most frequent causes of war, hostile to the views of civilizing and of governing the Indians. ” He went on to say that “ the first rationale of governing the Indians is to govern the whites, ” and noted the impossibility of this without a military presence. besides, he pointed out the dangers of traders introducing “ whiskey or ardent spirits ” without government cognition, presaging the belated ban—with indifferent results—on importing alcohol into indian country. During the winter at Fort Mandan, William Clark drafted a proposal for a network of twelve military posts “ to protect the indian trade and Keep the savages in peace with the U.S. and each early. ” He estimated that a total of 1,805 soldiers would be required ( who would besides act as boatmen ), which by itself would have been hard to meet, in scene of President Jefferson ‘s military Peace Establishment Act of 1802, an economy move which limited the standing army to 3,289 officers and men, a military unit which was already therefore wide dispersed among posts east of the Mississippi that none could have been spared. But even 1,805 soldiers would barely have been adequate to a peace-keeping character, in view of Clark ‘s own estimate of 17,660 indian warriors in the upper Louisiana territory. needle to say, both mens ‘ strategies would most likely have been doomed to failure .
On September 26, 1806, Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis and had been met by a disruptive welcome. The news they brought with them of the furs to be obtained in the west was of big interest to the participants in this great mid-continental center of the fur industry. But its entrepreneurial residents had not waited for the return of the excursion with this news, for they had been exploiting the river for decades. indeed, on their room up the Missouri in 1804 the Corps of Discovery met respective traders on their way back to St. Louis with furs obtained on the Upper Missouri. Some were returning with prizes, though the two Frenchmen they met below the Mandans complained that they had been robbed of their furs by that tribe near contemporary Bismarck. By the time the Corps returned, dozens of men were going up the Missouri to seek their fortunes. indeed, John Colter was given license to leave the Corps on its revert and play along two such traders, becoming one of the first of the celebrated “ mountain men. ”
After the Expedition
The Louisiana Purchase and the bait of its beaver population led to a authentic flood tide of traders and trappers moving toward the Upper Missouri and the Northern Rocky Mountains. On the early hand, the increasing traffic from St. Louis in what was now american english territory led to the decelerate abandonment of the overland trade in the United States by Canadian and british interests. By 1822 these economic invaders from the north had given up their interests in the Mandan and other residents of the newly territory held by the United States .
In 1803, General James A. Wilkinson, the inaugural governor of Louisiana Territory, was instructed to select a site for a military installation and a politics deal mail, and he established Cantonment Belle Fontaine, a few miles northwest of St. Louis. In 1805 Wilkinson besides sent out two expeditions—Lt. Zebulon M. Pike up the Mississippi, and Pierre Chouteau to the Osage Indians, to explore the newly-purchased region and choose sites for new trade posts. When Governor Wilkinson was removed from office in the summer of 1806 he was replaced by Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark was appointed the United States indian Agent for all of the tribes in Louisiana except the Osages. Both men were popular heroes in the region, and indeed throughout the state .
Lewis ‘s new administration was concerned about the possibilities of indian war in the western frontier. When he arrived in St. Louis as governor in 1808, Lewis found that the Sacs and Osages were upset at their treatment by the government .
That July, Governor Lewis wrote to Secretary of War General Henry Dearborn, advocating firm measures to counter them. Because Dearborn was not in Washington when the letter arrived, President Jefferson wrote to Lewis to express his own ideas on American-Indian relations, in which he decried war on Indians, commenting that “ commerce is the great locomotive by which we are to coerce them & not war. ” This approach was surely prompted in part by the small size of the american Army, and basically was followed until after the Civil War, when sufficient troops were available. The indian Wars that followed reduced the Plains tribes to reservation wards .
Lewis ‘s two most competent advisors were William Clark and Pierre Chouteau, agent for the Osages. Clark supported the establishment of federally-run politics trade posts. Belle Fontaine was closed in 1808 because it was excessively aloof from its intended customers, and William Clark established Fort Osage on the Missouri not far from contemporary Kansas City, and Fort Madison on the Mississippi. Both posts were to be ephemeral, and both were abandoned by 1813. indeed, all such government posts were abolished in 1821 .
Manuel Lisa
little companies and independent traders blossomed in the years following the return of Lewis and Clark, though these entrepreneurs soon would be overshadowed by boastfully, organized companies. Two men dominated the craft for many years : beginning, a maverick Spaniard in St. Louis, Manuel Lisa, and by and by the german immigrant John Jacob Astor. Manuel Lisa was the beginning private trader to lead an organized party upriver .
After founding the Missouri Fur Company ( 1807-1814 ), in which William Clark was a player, Lisa left St. Louis for the Upper Missouri in 1807. Pressing far upriver, he established Fort Raymond at the mouth of the Big Horn River on the Yellowstone River in contemporary Montana. He returned again in 1809, building a moment mail above the Mandan and Hidatsa villages. He made two more trips to exploit the impressiveness of the northern Rockies, and he dominated the upriver trade until 1820, two years before his death. His profits stimulated other parties to focus on the Missouri River but, despite much opposition, he maintained a near monopoly on the river for thirteen years .
One of Lisa ‘s most celebrated posts, Fort Manuel Lisa, was built about astride the advanced boundary between North Dakota and South Dakota. Occupied for only a few months, it was abandoned in 1812 when its residents fled second downriver, including Toussaint Charbonneau, whose Shoshone wife Sacagawea had recently died there of “ a putrid fever. ” The War of 1812 with England disrupted the fur deal along the Upper Missouri, and trade wind continued chiefly with groups along the lower Missouri. Furthermore, the costs of upriver operations required bang-up outlays of cash .
Lisa ‘s voyages up the Missouri, like those of most of his contemporaries, had been aboard keelboats—a craft admirably designed for travel on the Missouri. These awkward trade were some 50 to 60 feet long, 18 feet wide, with a orient bow and austere, and a moo cabin amidships. They carried a mast, but were normally manhandled upriver by means of long poles or a retentive r-2 that the men used to drag it bodily upstream in the shallows near one bank or the other .
These labor-intensive craft carried trade goods upriver and cargos of furs downriver in far greater quantities than the pirogues and other little craft used by individual traders .
Astor’s American Fur Company
Lisa ‘s success in the barter, albeit ephemeral, led to the geological formation by others of the Missouri Fur Company ( 1812-1830 ), one of the first of many consecutive and overlap american english companies dedicated to the avocation of fur bearers in the Central and Northern Plains. In 1808 John Jacob Astor ( Fig. 3 ) founded the american Fur Company ( AFC ), and in 1810 he tried to establish Astoria, a permanent post in the Pacific Northwest, but the post soon fell into british hands. But he focused his attention on the Missouri River, and in 1827 he bought out the Columbia Fur Company, established in 1822, and formed the Upper Missouri Outfit. The monopolistic caller, under Astor ‘s leadership, soon dominated the deal in the region, for its pitiless business tactics promptly bankrupted its smaller competitors. His business acumen led to bang-up profits, and he became the promontory of one of the inaugural multinational corporations, with agents in Europe, China, Canada, and the United States .
The story of the St. Louis -based fur companies is a building complex one, complicated by the many companies involved, and by the lurch business alliances that led to dissolutions, mergers, and reorganization until the Upper Missouri deal evaporated in 1867. By 1831, a chain of AFC posts and those of their ephemeral competitors lined the Missouri River and its major tributaries. The most authoritative AFC posts were Fort Pierre, about opposite the deliver city of Pierre, South Dakota ; Fort Clark, above modern Bismarck, North Dakota, and Fort Union ( Fig. 7 ), near the present North Dakota and Montana limit .
Other competitors
Competitors soon appeared near the AFC posts on the Missouri. For exemplar, in 1858 Frost, Todd, and Company built Fort Atkinson at Like-a-Fishhook greenwich village, the Hidatsa and Mandan settlement that had enjoyed the AFC ‘s monopoly since the greenwich village was founded in 1845. Though the person traders in the two posts remained friendly rivals, they often resorted to dirty tricks, and the exercise of the AFC was to undercut the prices of its rivals, so that within two years it had been driven out of business. Fort Atkinson became Fort Berthold II when the original Fort Berthold was destroyed by displace in 1862 .
native Americans were not passive participants in the barter, for they had traded extensively among themselves for generations before the arrival of Europeans and Americans. They were calculating traders and demanded quality goods. But they had not welcomed the arrival of white traders, for the tribe of the amphetamine Missouri had a booming and lucrative intertribal trade. indeed, one of the principal reasons for the near-altercation between the Sioux and the Corps of Discovery at the mouth of Bad River had been stimulated by two fears : that the traders would provide guns to their enemies, and at the lapp time diminish their function in a lucrative intertribal craft .
Ashley and Henry
In 1823 William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry founded a large party to ascend the Missouri to a steer near its source, but the excursion was attacked by the Arikaras and forced back downriver. To avoid such conflicts, Ashley initiated what was to become a fur-trade landmark : the rendezvous ( see Fig. 9 ). In the spring of 1825 he carried goods to the Rockies and there exchanged them for the furs obtained by the make bold and resourceful “ batch men ” who thereafter assembled annually to meet him. These deal fairs lasted for merely 16 years ( until 1840 ), but they became the stuff of legend because of the colorful individuals involved and their antics during the rendezvous, men that included such notables as John Colter and Jim Bridger .
The men traded the pelts they ‘d obtained the previous winter, refitted themselves for so far another year and, contrary to popular belief, returned to the mountains in groups, breaking into minor parties only to run their traps. Within three years Ashley became rich, and in 1826 he retired and successfully ran for Congress .
Buffalo robe era
By the 1830s the fur trade wind was sincerely important. rather of belittled craft returning downriver to St. Louis manned by a few traders, Ashley returned closely nine thousand pounds of beaver pelts from his 1825 rendezvous in the Rockies, and In 1827 Clark noted that $ 290,052.39 deserving of goods had been sent west for the indian trade alone. But the mountains could not sustain such intensive reap, and the trade collapsed in 1840 because beavers were about extinct, not because of the initiation of silk hats. Silk had been invented and was being sold long before the first gear rendezvous of the batch men in 1825. The gamey prices for beaver led to overtrapping that, together with flat prices, made it impossible for the trappers to make a live. By 1840 the beaver were closely gone, and the rendezvous ended. When other skins ( muskrat, raccoon and even sheep ) were used in stead of beaver it lowered the price for beaver even more. Combining these factors with the fiscal depression that struck the United States and Europe in 1837 spelt the sentence of the batch men and their quest for beaver .
The gawky keelboats and the department of labor needed to muscle them up the Missouri were replaced about overnight by a potent new technology : the steamboat. These trade had been used experimentally on the Missouri ampere early on as 1819, but in 1831 the AFC ‘s steamboat Yellow Stone ascended the Missouri a far as Fort Tecumseh, near contemporary Pierre, South Dakota. Profiting by its mistakes the former year, in 1832 the Yellow Stone reached Fort Union ( Fig. 7 ) the AFC post at the mouth of the Yellowstone River, 1800 miles above St. Louis. Steamboats soon ascended arsenic far as Fort Benton, downriver from modern Great Falls and the foothills of the Rockies. Unlike earlier craft, steamers carried goods in both directions by the long ton, eclipsing all previous deal .
Although many types of furs and skins were carried to these posts by neighboring tribes and unblock trappers, bison robes became the dominant product after 1830. By 1867, with fur bearers depleted and the bison all but extinct, tied this trade was all over. The surge westbound after the Civil War brought thousands of new residents into what had been the Louisiana Purchase. The abandonment of Fort Union in 1869 after a succession of owners generally is regarded as marking the end of the fur barter era on the Upper Missouri. Most of the resident traders and their akin moved back down the Missouri River, to be replaced by a flood of settlers and their families. The sites of their abandoned forts, once the pastures for bison, reverted to prairie grasses and nourished the cattle that replaced them .
figure 9
The Rendezvous
by Paul Clark Rockwood, Graphic artist, printmaker, and lithographer, American, ( 1895-1972 )
Ink and watercolour, 30¼ ten 17¾ inches
Provided by the National Park Service, Scotts Bluff National Monument
The celebrated batch man rendezvous that began with General William Ashley in July 1825 continued through 1840, creating an indelible image of this annual coalition of cultures. american and native american trappers met for 16 summers in locales centered on Jackson Hole to exchange their winter catches for supplies for the come year. Ashley carried away the equivalent of one million dollars ‘ worth of furs from merely the first gear two rendezvous .
Additional References
Chittenden, Hiram Martin. 1954. The American Fur Trade of the Far West. 2 vols. Stanford, California : academic Reprints .
Foley, William E. Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark. 2004. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Oglesby, Richard Edward. 1963. Manuel Lisa and the Opening of the Missouri Fur Trade. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Read more: Australia Maritime Strategy
Wishart, David J. The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807-1840. 1979. lincoln : University of Nebraska Press .
wood, W. Raymond, and Thomas D. Thiessen, eds. Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains. 1985. norman : University of Oklahoma Press .
Funded in part by the National Park Service ‘s Challenge-Cost Share Program
