Forging a Fur Empire: Expeditions in the Snake River Country, 1809–1824 by John Phillip Reid

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 4 disappointed.This leads me to my major criticism : issues that are in dispute are sometimes treated as if they are settled. Two examples: Chapter 2 incorporates Paisley Cave (which Jenkins excavated), a site producing radiocarbon dates as early as 14,000–14,500 calendar years ago, into the regional cultural chronology . The dates make Paisley Cave among the earliest sites in North America. The dates are controversial, a controversy that should be highlighted but is not. I write this as someone who accepts Paisley Cave’s dates and welcomes its inclusion into the region’s culture history. Chapter 4 makes a claim that speakers of Chinookan languages expanded up the Columbia River to The Dalles about 1,000 years ago. This is presented as established fact, which it is not. This question is potentially important given claims and disagreements over Native rights to various places and resources along the river.In short,thebookneedsmoredoubtorskepticism in its accounts. Kenneth M. Ames Portland State University Forging a Fur Empire: Expeditions in the Snake River Country, 1809–1824 by John Phillip Reid The Arthur H. Clark Company, Norman, Oklahoma, 2011. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. 240 pages. $29.95 cloth. John Phillip Reid has published path-breaking articles and books on legal aspects of the western North American fur trade, mostly focused on the Pacific Slope during the era of American-British joint occupation in the Oregon Country (1818–1846). Forging a Fur Empire deals with the “Snake Country Expeditions”initiated under the auspices of the North West Company and continued after the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) absorbed its chief rival in 1821. The book also discusses the arrival of American competitors in the Snake River Country. Reid briefly summarizes the Snake River Country expeditions from 1807 to 1824, then turns his attention to Alexander Ross and his leadership characteristics during the 1824–25 trapping season. Significantly, American trappers first arrived in numbers sufficient to compete against the HBC in the Snake River Countryduringthattime.TheAmericanleader of record was Jedediah S. Smith. In the same year, Ross was replaced by Peter Skene Ogden, whose success in the Snake Country has been contrasted with Ross’s putative “failure.” The main objective of the book is to demonstrate that Ross’s own men — especially the so-called “Iroquois” and“freemen” — caused his failure by“testingthelimitsof [his]leadership”inways that made him appear incompetent (p. 10). Whether lowly hired hands or elite field managers,fur traders were aware of legal principles bearing on property rights, contractual obligations, and reasonable limits on personal risks in the course of their work. Management of contested property rights, personal and community rights, and behavioral norms in the“Indian Country”required an outlook that differed from legal practices east of the Mississippi , where professional lawyers maintained continuity with ancestral legal cultures developed in Europe. Fur-brigade managers had to mesh their prescriptive legal principles with Native American principles of law emanating from their cultural traditions — a failure to do so could have cancelled or reduced the profits they avidly sought. Casting Ross as his central figure enables Reid to examine organizational, social, and economic aspects of the Snake River Country expeditions as well as labor and management conflicts that affected the potential for profit. HBC executive Sir George Simpson characterized Ross as an incompetent weakling who failed to lead his rough and rowdy engagés and “freemen,” many of whom were mixed-blood  Reviews Natives collectively categorized as “Iroquois.” Fur trade historians habitually accept Simpson ’s evaluation of Ross, but Reid disputes that interpretation. Instead, Reid argues, the fur trade’s hierarchical social structure, most effective at fixed trading posts, broke down in the Snake River Country, permitting unruly “Iroquois” and “freemen” to run rough-shod over Ross’s impotent complaints regarding his authority and his crew’s behavior. True, Simpson , Ogden, and Ross all bitterly reviled the “scum”in their employ, and low-end hirelings did sometimes run off, leaving uncollectable debts. But mixed-blood and Native trappers andhuntersworkedfor allof the fur companies in Oregon, as they had during two centuries of the North American fur trade, and it seems a stretch to lay Ross’s problems...