Joshua Pilcher: Fur Trader and Indian Agent by John E. Sunder

Abstract

Reviews 305 Aspiration interests him more than defeat. He can be as realistic as any modern novelist in describing the degradation and stagnation and despair of an Indian village, but he is not despairing about the efforts of the human spirit to break its chains and find fulfillment. He recognizes defeat as part of the human condition, but he never accepts the view that defeat is permanent or inevitable. Recent fiction about the Indian seldom shares this attitude. Take the Comanches in Edwin Shrake’s Blessed McGill (1969). They are crafty, dirty, and somewhat stupid— hardly people at all. Or take the young Kiowa in N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn. Abel, home from World War II, finds no place for himself among Indians or white men and disintegrates completely. Capps’ men and women, be they cowboys, Indians, or captives, may be lost, but they have an integrity which keeps them from degradation. When the fiction of the 1960’s is all written and evaluated, Ben Capps’ contribution may well turn out to be his conviction that life is an opportunity for learning and growth —not a trap or a sewer. C. L. So n n ich se n , University of Texas at El Paso Joshua Pilcher: Fur Trader and Indian Agent. By John E. Sunder. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968. xi + 203 pages, maps, illus., bibliography, index. $5.95.) Although Joshua Pilcher died in 1843, he has had to wait 125 years for this first full-length biography to appear. It traces all aspects of his life from his birth in Virginia in 1790 to his death in St. Louis after an eventful career in the fur trade of the trans-Mississippi West and finally, near the end, as Superintendent of Indian Affairs and successor to General William Clark in that office. Pilcher was an associate of Manuel Lisa in the Missouri Fur Company and a contemporary of the Chouteaus, Andrew Henry, the Sublettes, and other notables in the fur trade. He played his role on the frontier at the same time as William Ashley, whose “one-hundred young men” became famous in Western legendry as “mountain men” —Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Smith, Jim Beckwourth, and others. Yet, for all his industry, Pilcher never became the colorful figure that these others became. Nonetheless, he probably knew as much about the fur trade and Indian affairs as any man of his time. He moved indefatigably up and down the 306 Western American Literature Missouri tending to his business as trader or as Indian agent; he played an important role in the Arikara campaign in 1823; he ventured into the Rockies and traveled across much of western Canada; and he made numerous trips to Washington to report on Indian matters and to bolster his own political ambitions. A pulmonary illness took his life less than two years after he was removed from the Superintendency of Indian Affairs —apparently a victims of the spoils system— and, it is of interest to note, in the very year often taken as marking the real end of the Western fur trade. Sunder’s book is rich in factual detail, so replete in this respect, indeed, that the narrative suffers. For all the information in it, Pilcher never emerges as a personality. The facts are here, but the breath of life seldom if ever appears. Yet the book is built on firm data, and everything that Sunder writes is strongly buttressed by primary documentation. No one has ever investigated so thoroughly as he has the many hundreds of pieces of information lying in Pilcher’s extensive correspondence, in newspapers, and in government docu­ ments. As a result this biography has unquestioned authority, and probably no one ever again will feel the need to write a new biography of Joshua Pilcher. Mr. Sunder, who is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, is also the author of another biography, Bill Sublette, Mountain Man (1959), and of The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840-1865 (1965), both published as well by the University of Oklahoma Press. E d g e ley W. T odd, Colorado State...