Describes the life of a Hudson's Bay Company clerk, based on extracts from his letters.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the North West and Hudson�s Bay companies extended their operations beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. There they encountered a mild and forgiving climate and abundant natural resources and, with the aid of Native traders, branched out into farming, fishing, logging, and mining. Following its merger with the North West Company in 1821, the Hudson�s Bay Company set up its headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the lower Columbia River. From there, the company dominated much of the non-Native economy, sending out goods to markets in Hawaii, Sitka, and San Francisco. Trading Beyond the Mountains looks at the years of exploration between 1793 and 1843 leading to the commercial development of the Pacific coast and the Cordilleran interior of western North America. Mackie examines the first stages of economic diversification in this fur trade region and its transformation into a dynamic and distinctive regional economy. He also documents the Hudson�s Bay Company�s employment of Native slaves and labourers in the North West coast region.

How Japan, after 250 years of self--imposed isolation, began the process of modernization is in part the story of Ranald MacDonald. In 1848 this half-Scot, half-Chinook adventurer from the Pacific Northwest landed on an island off Hokkaido. Although promptly arrested and imprisoned for seven months in Nagasaki, the intelligent, well-educated MacDonald fascinated the Japanese and became one of their first teachers of English and Western ways. Based on primary research in Japan and North America, this book chronicles the events leading to MacDonald’s journey and his later struggle to obtain recognition at home. Frederik L. Schodt has written extensively on Japan, including America and the Four Japans and Inside the Robot Kingdom. Fluent in spoken and written Japanese, he lives in San Francisco. In 2009 he was received the The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette for his contribution to the introduction and promotion of Japanese contemporary popular culture. "Schodt's account of MacDonald's life and his eventual journey to Japan is depicted with the accuracy of a trained academic and the excitement of a skillful novelist." --Kyoto Journal

During a meteoric career that spanned from 1825 to 1834, David Douglas made the first systematic collections of flora and fauna over many parts of the greater Pacific Northwest. Despite his early death, colleagues in Great Britain attached the Douglas name to more than 80 different species, including the iconic timber tree of the region. David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work is a colorfully illustrated collection of essays that examines various aspects of Douglas's career, demonstrating the connections between his work in the Pacific Northwest of the 19th century and the place we know today. From the Columbia River's perilous bar to luminous blooms of mountain wildflowers; from ever-changing frontiers of technology to the quiet seasonal rhythms of tribal families gathering roots, these essays collapse time to shed light on people and landscapes. This volume is the companion book to a major museum exhibit about Douglas's Pacific Northwest travels that will open at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane in September 2012.

In about 1800, fur trader Charles Ermatinger married an Obijwa woman, Mananowe. Their three sons grew up with both their mother's hunter/warrior culture and their father's European culture. As adults, they lived adventurously in Montreal and St Thomas, where they were accepted and loved by fellow citizens while publicly retaining their Ojibwa heritage. The Ermatingers contrasts the "European" commercial and trading society in urban Montreal, where Charles was brought up, with the Ojibwa hunter/warrior values of Mananowe's society. Their sons variously risked life at war in Spain and in the Upper and Lower Canada rebellions, policed Montreal streets in an era of riots, spied on the Fenians on the US border, and made a hazardous journey to help establish the Canadian Pacific Railway's route. Brian Stewart argues that the sons' Ojibwa traditions and values shaped their adult lives: during their adventures, the sons fought for Native rights for themselves as well as for Ojibwa relatives and friends. The Ermatingers is an exciting story that contributes to our understanding of Indian and European biculturalism and its effects on those who make up the various forms of M�tis society today. It will appeal to general readers as well as scholars and students in Native studies and Canadian history.

Jean Barman was the recipient of the 2014 George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. In French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest, Jean Barman rewrites the history of the Pacific Northwest from the perspective of French Canadians attracted by the fur economy, the indigenous women whose presence in their lives encouraged them to stay, and their descendants. Joined in this distant setting by Quebec paternal origins, the French language, and Catholicism, French Canadians comprised Canadiens from Quebec, Iroquois from the Montreal area, and métis combining Canadien and indigenous descent. For half a century, French Canadians were the largest group of newcomers to this region extending from Oregon and Washington east into Montana and north through British Columbia. Here, they facilitated the early overland crossings, drove the fur economy, initiated non-wholly-indigenous agricultural settlement, eased relations with indigenous peoples, and ensured that, when the region was divided in 1846, the northern half would go to Britain, giving today’s Canada its Pacific shoreline.

The story of Jemmy Jock Bird, the son of a Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company and a Cree woman, is a little-known, yet fascinating, part of the mythology of the northern fur trade. Caught between opposing sides of a dual heritage, Bird situated himself firmly in both worlds. Hired as an undercover 'confidential servant', he crossed into US territory to bring furs taken by Cree and Peigan hunters to his British employers. Later, he served both nations, and his tribal friends, in the negotiation of the 1855 Blackfoot peace treaty and the 1877 Canadian Treaty 7. In this creative non-fiction account, Jackson reconstructs the life of this intriguing individual, using materials from the Hudson's Bay Archives, the Montana Historical Society, and Bird's descendants living on the American Blackfoot Reservation in Browning, Montana.

Canada's western wilderness was the scene of fur trader John Tod's extraordinary life. Born in a Scottish village in 1794, Tod spent 40 adventurous years working for the Hudson's Bay Company and in his later years, served on the first Legislative Council of the fledgling colony of Vancouver Island. Posted all over the Company's vast territory - York Factory, McLeod Lake, Fort Alexandria, Island Lake, Fort Kamloops - he spent most of his years in New Caledonia. A spirited and prickly man he was a free thinker, impatient with authority and distrustful of many of his superiors. He was also a lifelong and loyal friend to many of his fur-trade colleagues, especially John Work, the Ermatinger brothers and James Murray Yale. Tod saw astonishing changes in the west, from the bitter warfare between the Hudson's Bay Company and the Nor'Westers, to settlement by pioneers and the conventions of the polite colonial society. Few lives have spanned such contrasts. This definitive biography presents the picture of the unusual man in an exciting era.

The legendary mountain men—the fur traders and trappers who penetrated the Rocky Mountains and explored the Far West in the first half on the nineteenth century—formed the vanguard of the American empire and became the heroes of American adventure. This volume brings to the general reader brief biographies of eighteen representative mountain men, selected from among the essay assembled by LeRoy R. Hafen in The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West (ten volumes, 1965-72). The subjects and authors are: Manuel Lisa (Richard E. Oglesby); Pierre Chouteau Jr. (Janet Lecompte); Wilson Price Hunt (William Brandon); William H. Ashley (Harvey L. Carter); Jedediah Smith (Harvey L. Carter); John McLoughlin (Kenneth L. Holmes); Peter Skene Ogden (Ted J. Warner); Ceran St. Vrain (Harold H. Dunham); Kit Carson (Harvey L. Carter); Old Bill Williams (Frederic E. Voelker); William Sublette (John E. Sunder);Thomas Fitzpatrick (LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen); James Bridger (Cornelius M. Ismert); Benjamin L. E. Bonneville (Edgeley W. Todd); Joseph R. Walker (Ardis M. Walker); Nathaniel Wyeth (William R. Sampson); Andrew Drips (Harvey L. Carter); and Joseph L. Meek (Harvey E. Tobie).

In its rich detail, this book provides the first comprehensive history of the agricultural development of the Oregon Country. Based on extensive research in Hudsons's Bay Company documents, missionary records, and military and private papers, this book traces the crucial transition of the Pacific Northwest from a fur-trading outpost to an agricultural settlement -- a process which also saw the shift from British to American jurisdiction in the area.