Fur Trade Gamble: North West Company on the Pacific Slope, 1800–1820 by Lloyd Keith and John C. Jackson

Abstract

289 Reviews efforts to encourage and support immigration, which attracted many largely secular eastern European Jews less interested in religion than in social and economic opportunity to Portland. Throughout the narrative the author analyzes the Oregon Jewish experience clearly, and her data supports her thesis that Jews in the state changed as did the regional society. Her thematic approach is effective, her research is prodigious, using records of local ethnic organizations, media and newspapers, as well as oral history files from participants. In the “Preface,” Eisenberg warns that when doing ethnic history “focusing on a particular group or a specific region can easily lead to uncritical exceptionalism,” and while looking at Jewish matters nationally at times, this study does not avoid that issue entirely (p. xvii). Her bibliography includes only two items, one on African and another on Italian Americans, that might offer ideas for comparison, and it overlooks the many solid ethnic studies that would have allowed a few judiciously placed comparative paragraphs to achieve a broader context for her well-told narrative. While usually readable, a few places in the prose are loaded with terms many nonJewish readers may find unclear — page four offers a good example. Despite these minor complaints this book is a worthy successor to Steven Lowenstein’s 1987 The Jews of Oregon, 1850–1950. ROGER L. NICHOLS University of Arizona FUR TRADE GAMBLE: NORTH WEST COMPANY ON THE PACIFIC SLOPE, 1800–1820 by Lloyd Keith and John C. Jackson Washington State University Press, 2016. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, appendices. 336 pages. $42.00, cloth; $24.95, paper. In 1821, under pressure from Parliament, the North West Company (NWC) merged with and became subsumed into the larger Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), thereby consolidating British fur trading activity in western North America in one capital-rich and domineering chartered corporation. Created in 1784 in Montreal among a group of established traders (including venturesome partners Alexander McKenzie, David Thompson, and Peter Pond) , the NWC operated as a cooperative partnership and without the bureaucracy that characterized HBC functions. It allowed them to pioneer the British fur trade west across the Continental Divide, thrusting them into the American Pacific Northwest and Canada’s British Columbia. That bold action is always included in fur trade histories, but the HBC’s nineteenth-century entrepreneurial achievements generally dominate the larger story. The NWC’s push to the Pacific generally merits diluted coverage. In the posthumously published The Fur Trade Gamble, two accomplished fur trade historians redirect our attention to why, how, and with what consequences the NWC bet their future on trade in developing the Columbia River Basin fur resources. Lloyd Keith and John Jackson set out to document two decades of contributions NWC traders made to the fur business in the Pacific Northwest by recounting in considerable detail the tasks they undertook. The story they tell is punctuated by descriptions of NWC fur men’s tactical exploits against HBC rivals, their negotiations with Piikani bands for trespass on Native homelands, and ongoing difficulties carrying out their instructions in the face of slow communications with NWC managing partners hundreds of miles east of the Columbia. Keith and Jackson leave little out, with particular focus on the laborious travel — by canoe, foot, and horseback — fur traders endured to collect furs for packaging and shipment to market. The “gamble” refers to the NWC’s business plan to tap the fur resources on the Pacific and reward their effort with highly advantageous trade in China. The company’s inability to overcome the East India Company’s stranglehold on British trade in China, the complications created by the War of 1812, and insufficient management resources doomed the enterprise . Keith and Jackson are most effective in 290 OHQ vol. 118, no. 2 detailing NWC’s challenges and disappointments . Their discussion of how John Astor’s Pacific Fur Company base at Fort Astoria fell into British hands at the conclusion of the War of 1812 is particularly revealing, for the fate of Fort Astoria was far from certain. The authors emphasize the objections some British naval officers on the HMS Racoon expressed over their participation in handing off Fort Astoria to...