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.

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...

The Plains Indian of the Upper Missouri in the nineteenth-century buffalo days remains the widely recognized symbol of primitive man par excellence–and the persistent image of the North American Indian at his most romantic. Fifteen cultural highlights, each a chapter made from research for a particular subject and enriched by contemporary illustrations, provide a sensitive interpretation of tribes such as the Blackfeet, the Crows, and the Mandans from the decades before Lewis and Clark up to the present. In an attempt to understand and record the old culture of the Indians, the author has developed, over the past 30 years, a special ethnohistorical approach. The results, as seen here, are enlightening both for other ethnohistorians and for historians of more or less conventional bent. This book is abundantly illustrated from historical sources.