A Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri

The result of several decades of collaboration, A Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri merits cover-to cover reading. . . . Original manuscripts in French (and Spanish) are considered inaccessible by many students of the fur trade and of colonial St. Louis. For that reason, one important and potentially long-lasting benefit of this bilingual volume is that it can ease and even encourage further French-language study of various aspects of the fur trade, which is by no means yet fully explored. -Sharon K. Person, Missouri Historical Review This book is a chef d'oeuvre in ethnography, a work of love that spans nearly three generations of scholars. For anyone wanting to read a firsthand, in depth, intelligent account by a French fur trader whose two year long journal and his later conceived description of the upper Missouri about the Indians who lived there and their inter-tribal relations, this book is not to be missed. -Michael McCafferty, Le Journal One of the most complete, well-edited, and best ethnographic and geographical late eighteenth-century fur trading accounts to ever be published. . . . A must-read for First Nation people, historians, ethnologists, linguists, historical reenactors, and professional and laypersons alike and will continue to be the aller a for historical reference work for the Upper Missouri River fur trade era for generations to come. -Kenneth Carstens, Michigan Historical Review This volume is remarkable in its scope and scholarship. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of the fur trade in the disciplines of history, geography, anthropology, historical linguistics, and Native American studies. -Rob Bozell, Nebraska History This is the first comprehensive critical edition of documents related to Truteau's two-year sojourn among Indian nations of the Upper Missouri a decade before Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery arrived at the Mandan villages. Superbly translated, edited, indexed, and annotated, the book eclipses previous efforts. Side-by-side French and English transcriptions offer easy access to Truteau's narrative, and an opportunity for readers to develop a feel for the early eighteenth-century French that fur traders spoke in the pays d'en haut, the upriver country. . . . This superb book reflects the talents of top-flight scholars who gave Truteau's significant narrative the attention it merits. An impressive example of best practices in fur trade scholarship, it makes compelling reading and is highly recommended. -Barton H. Barbour, Great Plains Quarterly This excellent new volume of Truteau's writings is required reading for anyone with either a serious or passing interest in the history of the indigenous inhabitants of the Upper Missouri River or the fur trade that so dramatically changed their lives. -Greg Olson, Journal of the Iowa Archeological Society While it is fascinating enough to consider Truteau's journal as a primary source on the late-eighteenth-century fur trade, his journal not only provides a detailed description of the Upper Missouri but also an intriguing firsthand look into the culture, customs, traditions, beliefs, and ritualistic ceremonies of the region's Native Americans. . . . This book is a reference resource that will satisfy the needs of historians and linguists alike. -Eileen M. Angelini, French Review A Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri is a historically rich translated edition of crucial texts that explore and reflect on the cultures and environment along the Missouri River from Saint Louis to North Dakota. . . . Truteau's manuscripts are substantial, and the editor Douglas Parks's introductory essay is equally useful. -Aaron Luedke, Pacific Northwest Quarterly Raymond J. DeMallie, Douglas R. Parks and Robert Vezina have just published a remarkable contribution to this effort to make known and situate in its socio-cultural context a variety of French that remains undoubtedly still enigmatic for many Romanists. -Revue de linguistique romane With A Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri, DeMallie, Parks, and Vezina set a new standard for a critical and textual edition of a fur trade journal, providing the most complete versions of the Truteau journals in English and the original French. During Truteau's day Native Americans dominated the Northern Plains. The journals are rich in eyewitness descriptions of interactions among Truteau, his party, members of various bands and tribes, some qualified allies, and many unrelenting adversaries. A Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri also provides the necessary resources for a reader to begin to appreciate ways that Truteau's text is at many levels mediated by practices of the French fur trade society of the time. -David W. Dinwoodie, Journal of Anthropological Research The definitive study of Jean-Baptiste Truteau's contribution to North American history and ethnography. -Allan R. Taylor, Anthropological Linguistics This volume is a significant addition to previous scholarship. DeMallie, Parks, and Vezina have produced a valuable resource for anyone interested in Plains Indian history and the western fur trade. -Christopher Steinke, South Dakota History The proposed volume of DeMallie, Parks and Vezina stands out in two fundamental ways : it presents in bilingual version the texts of Truteau, which offers for the first time to an English-speaking public the whole corpus; it gives an excellent scientific edition, two of which must be remembered elements. -Soazig Villerbu, Social History This is the finest critical and textual edition ever crafted for presenting a fur trade journal. The full Truteau manuscript here is absolutely essential to the history of the fur trade in the United States and Canada. . . . We simply cannot adequately understand Plains ethnohistory without it. -Gilles Havard, research director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris and author of Histoire des coureurs de bois A major and unique contribution to the fields of anthropology, ethnohistory, history, linguistics, and travel literature. This is the first and only complete, reliable, and thoroughly researched edition of Truteau's writings. -Denys Delage, professor emeritus in the department of sociology at Laval University, Quebec, and author of Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64