May 3, 2001

Plains Folk: A Meeting of Cultures

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

The sheer visual impact of Fort Union is stunning. That’s true today, as historical tourists and touring historians arrive at the Fort Union reconstruction by the National Park Service in northwestern North Dakota. It was true just the same in the 1830s, after a new palisade with impressive stone bastions and a new bourgeois house, its design bespeaking New France on the Upper Missouri, had replaced the initial, rude constructions of 1829.

Fort Union, citadel of the American Fur Company, nerve center of its Upper Missouri Outfit, is the subject of a fine new book from the University of Oklahoma Press. Barton H. Barbour, the author of "Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade," is a National Park Service historian currently posted in Santa Fe.

Let me say at the outset, this is a book I commend highly to regional readers. It cannot fail to fascinate any northern plainsperson with a bit of curiosity about this place where we live. Its stories are ours.

Barbour writes in a fairly traditional historical fashion that evokes such masters as Bernard De Voto, who treated the Western American landscape as a great stage, across which trouped actors awed by its scale and splendor. Here traipse Bodmer, Maximilian, and all those other quaint tourists of another century; here come the village and itinerant native peoples of the plains, encountering European commerce through a hole in the wall; there sit Astor and Chouteau back east, politicking and capitalizing; and here, presiding over their northwestern headquarters, is McKenzie, King of the Upper Missouri. Armchair historians, dig in.

Those pausing to consider the interpretations and emphases layered onto the stories by the author will find meat to chew also. His most provocative assertion is that here on the Upper Missouri, in the context of the fur trade, there developed a rather impressive meeting of cultures (Scots, American, Indian, French, Métis, Black, Hispanic) on terms that proved the capacity of people to cooperate across ethnic lines. It is a commonplace these days to assail the fur traders for destroying native cultures and western environments. Barbour is less critical. He is fascinated, and favorable, toward this great encounter of peoples on the open plains.

He is, I think, sometimes captured by his sources, which were mainly documents generated by the fur traders themselves. He tends to view any sort of private enterprise (the American Fur Company, for instance) as vigorous and virile, any sort of government enterprise as (his adjective) floundering. Certainly he discounts way too much the powerful effects on the company and its trade on the plains environment, trying to excuse the company from the decline in bison that derived from its robe trade, even trying to shift the blame onto sport hunters such as Theodore Roosevelt. (Which just doesn’t make sense, or match up with the findings of good environmental historians of bison.)

A particularly intriguing episode has to do with a troublesome family named Deschamps resident in the locality of the fort during the 1830s. One reason it’s intriguing is that prairie Canadians of the twentieth century have generally viewed the international border as a troublesome place and Americans as the authors of multifarious schemes and threats against them. Go back to the 1830s, though, and it is the Hudson Bay Company littering the Upper Missouri with whiskey kegs, and the Deschamps family, coming from north of the Medicine Line, causing trouble at Fort Union.

They were a hard lot, robbing and raping and murdering travelers to the fort. Eventually the company employees, the engages, took up arms and marched on the miscreants, rubbing them out. Of course, western Canadians might say that sort of vigilante action was a typically American response of excess. But then, most of the engages were French Canadian. These matters are complicated thickets. Barbour and his book are good guides to bring us through.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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