The Fur Trade of the American West: A Geographical Synthesis

In stressing the exploitation and destruction of the physical and human environment rather than the usual frontier romanticism, David Wishart has provided for students of the trans-Mississippi fur trade a valuable service.-Journal of the Early Republ... Read more

In stressing the exploitation and destruction of the physical and human environment rather than the usual frontier romanticism, David Wishart has provided for students of the trans-Mississippi fur trade a valuable service.-Journal of the Early Republic. A standard reference work [that] should be required reading for all students of the American west.-Pacific Historical Review. The whole [fur trade] system is traced out from the Green River rendezvous or the Fort Union post to the trading houses of St. Louis and the auctions in New York and Europe. Such factors as capital formation, shifting commercial institutions, the role of advanced market information, and the nature, kinds, costs, and speed of transportation are all worked into the story, as is the relationship of the whole fur trade to national and international business cycles. This is an impressive achievement for a book so brief. . . . [It] opens out onto new methodological vistas and paradigms in western history.-William H. Goetzmann, New Mexico Historical Review David J. Wishart is a professor of geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize for distinguished books in American geography, sponsored by the Association of American Geographers for An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians, also available in a Bison Books edition. Less