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Summer 2017 Book Review of, Gamble: North West Company on the Pacific Slope, 1800-1820 by Lloyd Keith and John C. Jackson

William L. Lang Portland State University, [email protected]

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Citation Details Lang, William L., "Book Review of, Fur Trade Gamble: North West Company on the Pacific Slope, 1800-1820 by Lloyd Keith and John C. Jackson" (2017). History Faculty Publications and Presentations. 37. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/hist_fac/37

This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. efforts to encourage and support immigration, Bay Company (HBC), thereby consolidating which attracted many largely secular eastern British fur trading activity in western North European Jews less interested in religion than America in one capital-rich and domineer- in social and economic opportunity to Portland. ing chartered corporation. Created in 1784 Throughout the narrative the author ana- in among a group of established lyzes the Jewish experience clearly, traders (including venturesome partners Alex- and her data supports her thesis that Jews in ander McKenzie, David Thompson, and Peter the state changed as did the regional society. Pond) , the NWC operated as a cooperative Her thematic approach is effective, her research partnership and without the bureaucracy that is prodigious, using records of local ethnic characterized HBC functions. It allowed them organizations, media and newspapers, as well to pioneer the British fur trade west across as oral history files from participants. In the the Continental Divide, thrusting them into “Preface,” Eisenberg warns that when doing the American and ’s ethnic history “focusing on a particular group . That bold action is always or a specific region can easily lead to uncritical included in fur trade histories, but the HBC’s exceptionalism,” and while looking at Jewish nineteenth-century entrepreneurial achieve- matters nationally at times, this study does not ments generally dominate the larger story. avoid that issue entirely (p. xvii). Her bibliogra- The NWC’s push to the Pacific generally merits phy includes only two items, one on African and diluted coverage. another on Italian Americans, that might offer In the posthumously published The Fur ideas for comparison, and it overlooks the many Trade Gamble, two accomplished fur trade solid ethnic studies that would have allowed a historians redirect our attention to why, how, few judiciously placed comparative paragraphs and with what consequences the NWC bet their to achieve a broader context for her well-told future on trade in developing the Columbia narrative. While usually readable, a few places River Basin fur resources. Lloyd Keith and John in the prose are loaded with terms many non- Jackson set out to document two decades of Jewish readers may find unclear — page four contributions NWC traders made to the fur busi- offers a good example. Despite these minor ness in the Pacific Northwest by recounting in complaints this book is a worthy successor to considerable detail the tasks they undertook. Steven Lowenstein’s 1987 The Jews of Oregon, The story they tell is punctuated by descriptions 1850–1950. of NWC fur men’s tactical exploits against HBC Roger L. Nichols rivals, their negotiations with Piikani bands for University of Arizona trespass on Native homelands, and ongoing difficulties carrying out their instructions in the face of slow communications with NWC man- aging partners hundreds of miles east of the Columbia. Keith and Jackson leave little out, with particular focus on the laborious travel FUR TRADE GAMBLE: NORTH WEST — by , foot, and horseback — fur trad- ers endured to collect furs for packaging and COMPANY ON THE PACIFIC SLOPE, shipment to market. 1800–1820 The “gamble” refers to the NWC’s business by Lloyd Keith and John C. Jackson plan to tap the fur resources on the Pacific and State University Press, 2016. Illustrations, reward their effort with highly advantageous notes, bibliography, index, appendices. 336 pages. trade in China. The company’s inability to over- $42.00, cloth; $24.95, paper. come the ’s stranglehold on British trade in China, the complications In 1821, under pressure from Parliament, the created by the , and insufficient North West Company (NWC) merged with and management resources doomed the enter- became subsumed into the larger Hudson’s prise. Keith and Jackson are most effective in

Reviews 289 detailing NWC’s challenges and disappoint- DIVIDING THE RESERVATION: ALICE C. ments. Their discussion of how John Astor’s FLETCHER’S NEZ PERCE ALLOTMENT base at fell DIARIES AND LETTERS 1889–1892 into British hands at the conclusion of the War of 1812 is particularly revealing, for the fate of by Nicole Tonkovich Fort Astoria was far from certain. The authors Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2016. emphasize the objections some British naval Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. 334 pages. officers on the HMS Racoon expressed over $29.95 paper. their participation in handing off Fort Astoria to the NWC, rather than claiming it a prize An extraordinary collection of primary sources, of war. “The officer and crew of the Racoon, Dividing the Reservation provides important who expected prize money would be theirs,” details into how Indian agent Alice C. Fletcher Keith and Jackson note, “had to be satisfied carried out the General Allotment Act on the Nez with the knowledge that they had done their Perce reservation. Under the General Allotment duty ‘to ’” (p. 100). In Act, or Dawes Act, of 1887, U.S. Indian agents sur- addition, the authors point out, NWC partners veyed and broke up millions of acres of American at the newly named Fort George at Astoria had Indian tribal lands, allotting them to individual divided interests and internecine disputes that tribal members and selling off the so-called sur- further hampered the company’s ability to fulfill plus lands to non-Natives and corporations for a its plan in the Pacific Northwest. fraction of their value. For Indigenous communi- Many readers familiar with NWC’s interior ties in the United States, the Dawes Act stands as fur trade will find the sections on its maritime one of many devastating federal policies of the operations revealing, especially the voyages nineteenth century. Indeed, scholarship on the of the and two vessels named Dawes Act is robust, in part because the effect Columbia, which attempted to tap the China on each reservation community was unique. trade and fell far short, and the Colonel Allen, Literary scholar Nicole Tonkovich has curated a trading vessel meant to ferry NWC furs to this excellent collection of documentary sources the London market. The authors also cover — many of which appear for the first time in this the interior trade in the Columbia Basin after book. With an accomplished career, Fletcher was 1815, but in fleshing out NWC personalities both the first woman to serve as a federal Indian they often repeat descriptions of events and agent and hold an endowed chair at Harvard’s relationships dealt with earlier in the book. Peabody Museum of American Archaeology The authors also admit in notes that they and Ethnology. Tonkovich focuses only on the often had to speculate on events that went years of Fletcher’s work with the Nez Perce undocumented by participants. Nonetheless, and organizes this impressive assemblage of they have compiled considerable materials personal correspondence and field diaries from NWC correspondence and set it all in a chronologically. As the letters and diaries show, broad context. For anyone curious about how every summer from 1889 to 1892, Fletcher trav- NWC men, often traveling with their families, eled from Washington, D.C., to the Nez Perce tackled difficult and frustrating challenges on reservation to carry out the survey and allotment the west side of the Divide in the early nine- of the reservation. In her seemingly procedural teenth century, The Fur Trade Gamble is a most daily records and personal correspondence, informative account. In addition, the authors readers will see Fletcher’s “realization of the include two comprehensive appendices that gap between governmentality — in this case the cover all NWC personnel and business returns federal policy she had helped regulate — and the up to the merger with HBC, when NWC ceased daily lives of those it sought to regulate” (p. 1). to exist and began to fade from memory. Throughout her work on the reservation, William L. Lang Fletcher, an agent of the federal government Portland State University on the one hand and an intellectual fascinated

290 OHQ vol. 118, no. 2