French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West Summary and Reviews

French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West

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Book Summary Information

Editor: LeRoy R. Hafen
Introduction: Janet Lecompte
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1997-05-01
ISBN: 0803273029
Number of pages: 333
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Book Reviews of French Fur Traders and Voyageurs in the American West

Book Review: More fur trade biographies - this time the French participants
Summary: 5 Stars

I was surprised to learn in the introduction to this book that a complete roster of fur trappers and traders of the Far West would yield that 80% of the men had French surnames. It's not uncommon to come across French names in diaries and records of the Mountain Man period, but with so much emphasis placed on the accomplishments (and they were many and noteworthy) of men like Smith, Walker, Bridger, Carson, Ashley, and Fitzpatrick, it's easy to overlook what should be common sense: French engages and chasseurs, most from Canada, had long roamed the West and knew its rivers and streams well before Ashley organized the first trapping expedition to the trans-Missouri West in 1822.

So it was with heightened interest that I perused this volume by LeRoy Hafen, a compilation of biographies of 22 French participants in the fur trade enterprise; all of them originally appeared in Hafen's 10-volume THE MOUNTAIN MEN AND THE FUR TRADE OF THE FAR WEST, published in the 1960s. (Instead of issuing excerpts as in this book and the three others like it, I wish Bison Books had just republished the whole 10-volume work.) The biographies are fairly comprehensive (some 20+ pages, most 10-20 pages, only one short at five pages), and attempt to detail the movements and activities of each man. I found it interesting that the man Brown identified with Brown's Hole in northwestern Colorado just might be Jean-Baptiste Chalifoux, a trapper mainly operating out of Taos who had gone overland to California more than once (his name is found etched on a rock near Willow Creek in Utah). One perhaps unintended accomplishment of the biographies is the disputation of the unflattering stereotypes of the French voyageurs that have been perpetuated in some later books, that they were cowardly and lazy. The lives lived by these men as depicted here point to just the opposite.

A disappointment I had with the book is that a few of the entries were also included in other books in the series; why this was done when there were so many men to choose from in the 10-volume set is a mystery. But despite the repetition, the book is an excellent source for information on the fur trade period. It's also an interesting (and inspiring) book to read.

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