Fur Trade: The Men: Journals and Art

10 volumes

Though France lost her North American possessions in 1763, thousands of her natives remained on the continent. Many of them were voyageurs for Hudson's Bay Company, whose descendants would join American fur trade companies plying the trans-Mississippi West. This volume documents the fact that in the nineteenth century Frenchmen dominated the fur trade in the United States. Twenty-two biographies, collected from LeRoy R. Hafen's classic ten-volume The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, represent a variety of origins and social classes, types of work, and trading areas.

In the early 1800s vast fortunes were made in the international fur trade, an enterprise founded upon the effort of a few hundred trappers scattered across the American West This volume brings together brief biographies of seventeen leaders of the western fur trade, selected from essays assembled by LeRoy R. Hafen in The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West (ten volumes, 1965-72).

Alfred Jacob Miller, who was born in Baltimore in 1810, was the artist selected by Sir William Drummond Stewart to accompany his historic expedition to the Far West in 1837, to "sketch the remarkable scenery & incidents of the journey."

Exhibition of three of the most important artists of the early period of the Trans-Mississippi West: George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, Alfred Jacob Miller.

Presents original drawings, paintings, and lithographs by the noted nineteenth-century artists: Charles Bird King, George Catlin and Karl Bodmer.