Describes the customs and manners of five Missouri Indian tribes by the author who was a fur trader in Missouri for more than twenty years.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. The Origins of the Missouria: Woodland, Mississippian, and Oneota Cultures -- 2. The Europeans Arrive: Change and Continuity -- 3. Early French and Spanish Contacts -- 4. Turmoil in Upper Louisiana -- 5. The Americans: Rapid and Dramatic Change -- 6. The End of the Missouria Homeland -- Epilogue: Allotment and a New Beginning -- For Further Reading and Research -- Index.

Edwin Thompson Denig was assigned as the post bookkeeper at Fort Union on the Upper Missouri in 1837 by the American Fur Company. He spent close to two decades there and married into the Assiniboine. In the summer of 1851, Father Pierre Jean de Smet spent two weeks at Fort Union. He encouraged Denig to write a number of sketches of the manners and customs of the Assiniboine and neighboring tribes. Denig compiled additional information in response to queries by early ethnographers, including Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who were collecting ethnological information about Indian tribes in the United States.

Particularly valuable for Ronda's inclusion of pertinent background information about the various tribes and for his ethnological analysis. An appendix also places the Sacagawea myth in its proper perspective. Gracefully written, the book bridges the gap between academic and general audiences.OCo"Choice""

This manuscript is entitled "A Report to the Hon. Isaac I. Stevens, Governor of Washington Territory, on the Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri, by Edwin Thompson Denig." It has been edited and arranged with an introduction, notes, a biographical sketch of the author, and a brief bibliography of the tribes mentioned in the report. The report consists of 451 pages of foolscap size; closely written in a clear and fine script with 15 pages of excellent pen sketches and one small drawing, to which illustrations the editor has added two photographs of Edwin Thompson Denig and his Assiniboin wife, Hai-kees-kak-wee-lãh, Deer Little Woman, and a view of Old Fort Union taken from "The Manoe-Denigs," a family chronicle, New York, 1924. The manuscript is undated, but from internal evidence it seems safe to assign it to about the year 1854...

Their story provides a telescopic view of issues that would sweep the nation for the remainder of the nineteenth century: the promise and anxiety inherent in post-Civil War nation building, the complexities involved in westward expansion, and the changing nature of mid-nineteenth century manhood. Butts seamlessly maintains a human face on events of national import, punctuating her thoroughly researched narrative with excerpts from Dimon's letters home.