Anne F. Hyde

This was not quite the book that I thought it was going to be when I started it. For one, I had forgotten that back in 2017 I had read the author's "Empires, Nations and Families," which treads over much the same ground. That said, this is a better treatment of many of the same themes, only from the perspective of what Native American women brought to the the marriages of convenience that Hyde is writing about. Having spent thirty years as an an archivist in the employ of the U.S. federal government, I appreciate that, for many people, family and personal relationships are their wedge to understanding history. That said, the further Hyde gets away from writing about the pre-1860s fur trade, the shallower this book seems. Still, since I'm not really the audience for this book, this can be taken to being petty carping.

Apart from that, I would have preferred to see a proper bibliography, though that might not be the author's decision. Less good is that when Hyde cites documents from the U.S. National Archives she is somewhat inconsistent in doing so. You might say that this is another case where I'm being over-critical, but one of the annoyances of my old job were bad citations, and I expect better from a full professor; particularly when the agency offers a 30-page pamphlet on how to consistently explain what records one has used.… (mehr)

A sprawling account of the Trans-Mississippi West between the consummation of the Louisiana Purchase and the outbreak of the American Civil War, the author uses the fur trade (at least initially) as a lens to illustrate how the West could have developed in a more organic fashion, without the near annihilation of the Indian nations in the face of the massive waves of settler colonialism; none of these frontier merchants achieved much without a willingness to take the cultural norms of the First Nations seriously. I'm not quite as impressed with this work as I thought I might be in the sense that it could have used more focus. Still, the author does do the popular historiography of the West a service by reminding the reader of the violence and chaos and injustice of it all.… (mehr)