The Fist in the Wilderness

Cover
U of Nebraska Press, 01.05.1998 - 490 Seiten
The story of the American fur trade has been told many times from different viewpoints, but David Lavender was the first to place it within the overall contest for empire between Britain and the United States. Rather than offering a simple hagiography of men like Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger and other legendary trappers, Lavender relates the story of men such as John Jacob Astor and Ramsay Crooks who competed with Britain?s Hudson?s Bay Company for the fur resources of the Great Lakes region and the upper Missouri River country.

Within this framework of contest and competition, Lavender shows how the American Fur Company learned to exploit the needs and wants of Indian tribes to gain a superior economic position over the British. The brutal and bloody rivalry helped Ramsay Crooks develop the techniques for transporting furs, supplying trappers, and selling pelts that made fur trapping such an integral economic activity in early U.S. history.

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Inhalt

The Pawns of War
178
Small Fights for Large Stakes
194
Sweet Fruits of Defeat
209
Bright New Vistas American Style
228
Taste of Power
238
The Breath of Failure
255
The Fist Closes
277
Pressures
294
The Colossus
367
Strangling the Missouri
382
The Spasms of Change
398
A NOTE ON THE BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
420
The Key and the Door
425
Citizenship by Necessity
432
Frustrations
439
By
445

Triumph
314
Defeats
332
Tensions
349

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Autoren-Profil (1998)

David Lavender lives in California. David J. Wishart is a professor of geography at the University of Nebraska?Lincoln and the author of The Fur Trade of the American West: A Geographical Synthesis, also a Bison Book.

Bibliografische Informationen