This is the first exhaustive history of one of the most important fur-trading posts in the nineteenth-century United States. Built by the American Fur Company in 1829–30 near the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, Fort Union would assure the company and its successor, Pierre Chouteau & Company, dominance of trade on the upper Missouri for more than three decades. Barton H. Barbour sets out to show not only how the fort itself functioned but also how the established fur trade operated, why it was noteworthy, and how its demise was linked to an expanding and industrializing America after the Civil War. In reaching these goals, he succeeds admirably.
An introduction that includes as fine a thumbnail sketch of the intricacies of the fur-trade business as one could wish is followed by an interesting chapter detailing the construction and expansion of the fort, which Barbour presents as the focal point between up-river trading and capitalists in St. Louis and New York. Subsequently he describes how Pierre Chouteau supported the arts, ethnology, and natural science by extending hospitality to a continuous procession of artists, missionaries, scientists, sportsmen, and others bold enough to venture so far into the wilderness—among them Prince Maximilian, George Catlin, John James Audubon, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Father Pierre De Smet. This strategy was excellent public relations as well as a boon to the advancement of knowledge.
One of the most fascinating parts of the book is Barbour's perceptive analysis of Fort Union's cosmopolitan society. The post housed no troops; it was a business establishment, a self-contained community with a hundred or so employees on the premises and twice that many more in small satellite camps along the river, as far as the head of navigation at Fort Benton. Many were engagés, under contract to handle the keelboats and, later, the steamers on the river between the fort and St. Louis, and to perform much of the hard labor. Of these, French Canadians and mixed bloods predominated, but a substantial number of western Europeans, some Hispanics, and a few African Americans were visible as well. Other employees were professional hunters, to provide food, and any of a number of artisans, among them gunsmiths, blacksmiths, carpenters, tinsmiths, and even a tailor. The bourgeois, or supervisor, who was often a partner, and the traders and clerks made up an "upper class," who presided over this unconventional social assortment and became, in the absence of legal apparatus, the chief guardians of law and order. Mixed marriages were the rule, even among the supervisors, a fact that was crucial in cementing relations with the Assiniboine, Crow, Blackfeet, Cree, and other tribes that provided the furs and cured the buffalo robes.
Later chapters deal with traders, intercourse laws, and Indian policy, all of which Barbour finds much more tangled and subtle than was originally thought. If the federal government sought to regulate certain trades (for example, the sale of liquor) to prevent abuses, its ability to enforce was minimal. By its presence on the scene, Pierre Chouteau & Company provided surrogate control over the Indians. With its own steamboats, the company contracted to move army supplies and land Indian annuity goods, in the process ignoring rules set in Washington and becoming, until the Civil War, the only real force on the Upper Missouri.
The American Fur Company, subsequently Chouteau, has often been cited as the first large monopoly in the West. Barbour devotes a good deal of space, probably too much, in developing the argument that it did not achieve full monopoly because small competitors emerged from time to time, and he draws on the Hudson Bay Company experience to bolster his argument that a full monopoly would have improved both the fur trade and Indian policy.
"New West" historians in recent years have viewed the westward movement as characterized by doom, gloom, and disaster—a process of greed, debasement, and exploitation. Once regarded as at least a minor hero, the fur trader is now accused of contributing to the destruction of Indian life and culture and is no longer viewed as being on the side of the angels. Barbour gives a more balanced appraisal, noting other factors that contributed to the Indians' woes: the push of miners, farmers, and ranchers west across Indian hunting grounds, for example, killed off many bison, which were already being decimated by bovine diseases. When plains tribes took to the warpath in response, federal troops were dispatched against them after the Civil War. Barbour emphasizes that at Fort Union the needs of fur traders and Indians coincided in a setting that intertwined various ethnic cultures into a viable part of a successful business enterprise. A feeble national presence did not interfere with nomadic Indian life, which depended on the buffalo, as did the robe trade. Traders were not interested in settlement or land. The fort and the fur trade were victims of the westward settlement thrust, which brought about the decline of Indians and buffalo alike. Chouteau sold out in 1865 to a group of rascals, who soon floundered. Fort Union was dismantled in 1867.
This is a well-written, superbly researched book, embellished by twenty-two illustrations and a map. It is at once a combination of scholarly common sense and provocative ideas. The story represents much more than a chronicle of one isolated trading post: it incorporates regional, national, and even international components and implications. This account of Fort Union is indeed a sound contribution to the literature of the fur trade.