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During the winter of 1787-1788, 17 year-old David Thompson, a Welshman employed by the Hudson's Bay Company, visited a Piegan village located in the Bow River country, somewhere in the proximity of present-day Calgary. During his stay, he recorded stories recounted by an old Cree warrior named Saukamappee (Young Man), who was approximately 75 years of age and had been adopted into Piegan society during the late 1730s. Saukamappee's account sheds much light on the history of the northwestern Plains by discussing Saukamappee's first encounters with horses and guns, and offering some insight into how those powerful tools forever changed the nature of Shoshone-Piegan warfare. Thompson included Saukamappee's oral account in his Narrative.
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Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Verendrye, was born in New France, in the town of Three Rivers (in the modern-day province of Quebec) in 1685. He spent some of his early life in the army before establishing a small trading post on his property near Three Rivers, and in 1727 he received command of the French trading posts on Lake Nipigon(north of Lake Superior, in the modern-day province of Ontario). From there, Verendrye directed a series of expeditions with the purpose of finding a route to the Western Sea. The journal excerpted here is a product of one such venture, which reached the upper Missouri in 1738. Verendrye himself did not remain on the Missouri for long before he returned to his post, but he left two of his men with the Mandans or Hidatsas to learn their language and customs. Therefore, it records not the observations of Verendrye himself, rather, it offers the report of the pair of Frenchmen who stayed with the villagers.
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Although some debate surrounds which one of Verendrye's two sons was the Chevalier, it appears likely that the older of the two who ventured to the Missouri and beyond between April 1742 and July 1743, Louis Joseph (rather than Francois), was the one who produced the account excerpted here. Likewise, the precise course of the expedition's travels remains unclear, as scholars posit muliple theories, some having the expedition making it to the Rocky Mountains while others argue that the explorers made it only to the Black Hills (this appears to be the more likely case). The few definitive geographical points are marked on the project map. Despite the journal's many ambiguities regarding precise locations and its ambiguous identifications of Native groups that the explorers encountered, it nevertheless offers some insight into eastern Shoshone (Gens du Serpent) history.
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Born in England on the Isle of Wight (date unknown), Anthony Hendry worked as a fisherman before joining the Hudson's Bay Company in 1750 to work as a net-maker and general laborer. After his arrival at York Factory, Hendry gained some experience as an overland traveler, as joined Native groups with the purpose of measuring distances between York Factory and certain points. From June 1754 to June 1755, Hendry accompanied a party of Cree Indians southwestward from York Factory as far as just westward of present-day Red Deer in Alberta. During the journey, which was intended to provide with Hudson's Bay Company with information about the area to the west of York Factory, as well as to recruit Natives to participate in the fur trade, Hendry encountered some Blackfeet Natives, but failed to persuade them to engage in the fur trade. Nevertheless, Hendry's journal sheds some light on the state of affairs on the northwestern Great Plains at midcentury.
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Matthew Cocking was born in York, England in 1743. Little is known of his life before he joined the Hudson's Bay Company in 1765, for whom he worked as a writer. In 1772, he volunteered to go on an expedition indland from Hudson's Bay after the acting chief at York Factory, Andrew Graham cited a need for a coherent report of the country inland. Cocking's express purposes during his journey which spanned from June 1772 to June 1773 were essentially the same as Hendry's nearly twenty years earlier: to explore the region to the west of Hudson's Bay, and to persuade Natives to begin participating in the fur trade. That journey, during which Cocking accompanied a party of Crees, took him southwestward from York Factory throught he Saskatchewan country, almost reaching as far as the ground contested by Eastern Shoshones and Blackfeet groups at the time between the Red Deer and Bow rivers. Although (like Hendry before him) he failed to convince the Blackfeet that he encountered to make the long journey to York Factory to trade, his account provides much insight into their culture at the time. Moreover, Hendry's expedition led to the establishment of Cumberland House on the North Saskatchewan in 1774.
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A continuation of Saukamappee's oral account to David Thompson during the winter of 1787-1788, this excerpt discusses the 1780-1782 northern Great Plains smallpox epidemic, providing some insight into the disease's spread, its tremendous toll, and its troublesome aftermath. For a discussion of who Saukamappee was, please see above.
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David Thompson was born in Westminster, England, on April 30, 1770. He departed from England in the spring of 1784, arriving at Churchill (north of Fort York on the western shore of Hudson's Bay, in present-day Manitoba) in the early fall and there began is employment for the Hudson's Bay Company. In the fall of 1785, he arrived at Fort York and during the following summer he began the first of his many travels inland. As part of the Company's effort to secure a trade relationship with the Blackfeet (particularly the Piegans), Thompson headed a small party (a total of seven men) that visited the Bow River country near the present-day city of Calgary in 1787-1788, where he met Saukamappee and compiled an extensive early ethnological description of the Piegans at the age of seventeen. His records therefore not only encompass Saukamappee's above recollections, but also Thompson's own observations on the Piegan Blackfeet and their relationship with the Eastern Shoshones, as excerpted here. Thompson joined the North West Company in 1797, continuing his explorations and mapping of the northwest until 1812. Thereafter he worked as a surveyor before settling down in the Montreal until his death in 1857. His Narrative is a synthesis of his experiences and work as a member of the Hudson's Bay Company, and then of the North West Company. For a recent map of Thompson's journeys, click here (the map originally appeared in the May 1996 edition of National Geographic).
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Born in Scotland in November 1768, John McDonnell emigrated to New York in 1773, and thereafter to Canada. McDonnell joined the Northwest Company in 1793 and, from May to October 1793 and October 1793 and through June 1795, produced two journals documenting his experiences as a trader posted on the Upper Red River, as it was called at the time (today it is the Assiniboine River). The excerpts included here are taken from a synthesis of those journals. Produced in 1797, McDonnell's narrative offers a glimpse into Eastern Shoshone history, as captured by the author at his post on the far northeastern reaches of the Great Plains.
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Duncan M'Gillivray was born in Scotland during the early 1770s and by the early 1790s he had joined his brother as an employee of the North West Company. He spent the 1793-1794 trading season at Pine Island Fort on the North Saskatchewan before relocating to Fort George to serve as a clerk for the 1794-1795 season. It was there that he composed the journal excerpted here, which provides some insight into local Native affairs, which included some references to Shoshones. M'Gillivray continued to work in the interior until 1802, when he relocated to Montreal, from where he engaged in administrative duties relating to the fur trade before passing away in 1808.
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Georges-Henri-Victor Collot was born in France in 1750 and, later, as a member of the French military he journeyed to North America to fight on the side of the colonies against Great Britain. In 1796, the French Minister to the United States, Pierre Adet, asked Collot to explore and map the inner parts of the continent. From March to December of that year, Collot and a few companions surveyed along (parts of) the Ohio, Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri rivers, taking note of both firsthand observations and secondhand information. Collot's records and maps were not published before his death in Paris in 1805, but in 1826. The map included here is part of Collot's work and offers a fascinating and insightful perspective on contemporary perceptions of the West in terms of geography.
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Little is known about Charles Le Raye except that he was the son of James Le Raye, the Count de Chaumont, who emigrated from France to America with Lafayette, served in the Revolutionary War on the side of the colonists, and afterward took up residence in New York near the head of Lake Ontario. Charles, who left Canada to trade on the Missouri River in 1801, produced a journal which was first published in 1812, in Boston. Some claim that Charles Le Raye never existed and that the journal (which is a captivity narrative because Le Raye allegedly produced the journal while held captive by a group of Lakota Sioux) is a hoax because of its ethnographical and geographical inaccuracies. Nevertheless, its many historical and geographical accuracies indicate that someone familiar with the northern Great Plains and its peoples produced the document and it therefore offers some historical value. The journal is relevant to this project because Le Raye (or whomever produced it) encountered Shoshones somewhere near the mouth of the Bighorn River in present-day Montana.
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Pierre-Antoine Tabeau was born near Montreal, Canada in 1755. Records about his early life are few, but it appears that by the late 1770s he had begun trading in the west (the Illinois country) and by the early 1780s had established himself in the country. In 1795, he participated in the Spanish Company of Commerce's Lecuyer expedition from St. Louis to the upper Missouri. From June 1803 to May 1805, Tabeau was part of Regis Loisel's expedition to the upper Missouri. Tabeau produced the document excerpted here for the express purpose of it being a supplementary material to Loisel's offical report to Spanish authorities. Tabeau spent much of 1803-1805 among the Arikaras, from whom he learned not only about those Natives, but also about the many others that populated the Plains. Although Loisel died in 1804, some speculation persists regarding the authorship of Tabeau's Narrative.
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Born in August 1784 in L'Assomption, Quebec, Francois-Antoine Larocque at age 17 joined the XY Company (a short-lived competitor of the Northwest Company) as a clerk. Larocque first went west from eastern Canada in 1801, first to Grand Portage, then Fort Charlotte, then to the Churchill River, and then to the Assiniboine River. Sometime between 1802 and 1804, Larocque left the XY Company and joined the Northwest Company. In the employ of that company, he made three separate trips to the upper Missouri to trade with the Mandans and Hidatsas between November 1804 and September 1805, producing two separate journals - one for the first two trips and one for his third and final. The "Missouri Journal" covers the first two trips, during which he encountered the American explorers Lewis and Clark. He offered to join their expedition, but they declined. On his third trip to the Missouri from June to September 1805, Larocque had orders from North West company authorities to visit the Rocky Mountains and assess their beaver population. In order to do this, the 21 year-old Larocque and two companions joined a band of Crows who visited the upper Missouri villages to trade and ventured with them into the Crow homeland in the Bighorn Mountains of present-day Wyoming and Montana, trekking as far as the middle reaches of the Yellowstone River - somewhere around the mouth of the Bighorn River. Larocque returned to the Assiniboine River after that expedition in the fall of 1805, and in 1806 he left the west for good. His day-by-day journals are primarily valued for their many contributions to the ethnological study of the Crows, but, the excerpts included here also shed light on Eastern Shoshone history.
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William Clark was born on August 1, 1770 in Virginia. The Clark family relocated to Kentucky in 1784 and William served in the army from 1789 to 1796 - it was during that time that he met Meriwether Lewis, who was one of his subordinates at the time. The two remained friends thereafter, and in 1803 Lewis invited Clark to co-captain his upcoming expedtion to explore the newly acquired Lousiana Territory. Lewis was born on August 18, 1774 in Virginia as part of a family that had close ties to the Jefferson family. In 1780, the Lewis family relocated to Georgia and from 1794 to 1801 he served in the army. In 1801, he left the army to become a secretary to his longtime acquaintance, new President Thomas Jefferson. Soon thereafer, the two began discussing a possible expedition to explore the area to the west of the young United States and in 1803 Congressional approval of the plan set the gears in motion for the journey that ultimately lasted from spring 1804 through the summer of 1806. That expedition trekked from St. Louis up the Missouri River, across the Rocky Mountains in present-day Montana and Idaho, and then along the Columbia River to the Pacific coast. On the way back, the explorers parted ways for a fraction of the journey, with Clark trekking along the Yellowstone River. Their records ultimately produced a rich body of knowledge about the geography and plant and animal life in the West, as well much ethnographical information about many Native groups. Especially insightful for this project were their encounters with Shoshone peoples and their related comments.
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This map, a copy of William Clark's original drawing produced by Samuel Lewis, was based on the findings of their 1804-1806 "corps of discovery" expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific and back. Samuel Lewis was an English editor and publisher of maps and topographical dictionaries who operated out of London. Although his work mostly centered on the various parts of the United Kingdom, he did edit this map for publication with Bradford and Inskeep of Philadelphia in 1814.
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Little is known about the life of Charles Mackenzie. He was born in Scotland in 1774, but when he emigrated to North America is unclear. Mackenzie began a career as a clerk with the Northwest Company in 1803 and it was in that capacity that he participated in four separate trips to the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the upper Missouri between 1804 and 1806 from his post with the Red River Department. Two of those trips were made in the company of Francois Antoine Larocque (see above), and during this visits he interacted with many individuals of the Hudson's Bay Company, as well as Lewis and Clark. His records of those visits were central to the early ethnological study of the Hidatsas, and they provide some insight into the history and culture of other Native groups. Mackenzie apparently produced the narratives excerpted here in 1809-1810, based on his original daily journals (which are now lost). Furthermore, this narrative is actually a synthesis of four different handwritten manuscripts, condensed by Wood and Thiessen.
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Alexander Henry (the younger) was born in approximately 1765 in New Jersey, into a family that had migrated from England to the middle colonies earlier in the century. During the 1760s and 1770s, his father and an uncle engaged in the fur trade and extended their operations westward from New York throughout the Great Lakes country. In 1792 the elder Henry (also Alexander) joined the North West Company as a clerk. The younger Henry also did so in that same year and worked in that capacity until 1801, when he became a partner in the company. From the commencement of his journal in 1799 until its end in 1814, Henry produced a rich historical record relating to not only the fur trade, but also the northern Great Plains, the Canadian parklands, and the Columbia Plateau. Although he wrote extensively while in the Red River and upper Missouri River countries from 1799 to 1808, his writings relating his experiences in the Saskatchewan River and Columbia River countries from 1808 to 1814 offer tremendous insight into Shoshone-Blackfoot affairs at that time, and so his observations made while posted at Fort Augustus are here excerpted.
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