Fur Traders, Trappers, and Mountain Men of the Upper Missouri

The American Fur Company took shape as John Jacob Astor's dream of empire. By the time of Astor's retirement in 1834, this corporate monopoly had expanded westward from a depot on Mackinac Island to subposts beyond the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. Fur Traders, Trappers, and Mountain Men of the Upper Missouri focuses on the biographies of eighteen men who represented the American Fur Company and its successors in the Upper Missouri trade. These chapters have been compiled from the classic ten-volume Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen, and bring back the movers and shapers of a great venture.

Among the featured individuals are Ramsay Crooks, the mountain man who headed the American Fur Company after Astor; Kenneth McKenzie, known as the "King of the Missouri;" Gabriel Franchere, a survivor of the Astorian disaster; and Charles Larpenteur, the commander of Fort Union and a chronicler of the fur trade. The book also includes the fiery William Laidlaw, the ambitious James Kipp and John Cabanne Sr., the diplomatic David Dawson Mitchell and Malcolm Clark, the goutish James A. Hamilton (Palmer), the controversial John F. A. Sanford and Francis A. Chardon, the easy-going William Gordon, and the ill-fated William E. Vanderburgh.

Completing this memorable cast are Alexander Culbertson, a skilled hunter; Auguste Pike Vasquez, a mountain man; Henry A. Boller, an educated clerk; and Jean Baptiste Moncravie, a trader and raconteur. These biographies provide a glimpse into the lives and experiences of the individuals who shaped the American Fur Company's operations in the Upper Missouri region during the early to mid-19th century.

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