In this book, Barton Barbour presents the first comprehensive history of Fort Union, the nineteenth century's most important and longest-lived Upper Missouri River fur trading post. Barbour explores the economic, social, legal, cultural, and political significance of the fort which was the brainchild of Kenneth McKenzie and Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and a part of John Jacob Astor's fur trade empire. From 1830 to 1867, Fort Union symbolized the power of New York and St. Louis, and later, St. Paul merchants' capital in the West. The most lucrative post on the northern plains, Fort Union affected national relations with a number of native tribes, such as the Assiniboine, Cree, Crow, Sioux, and Blackfeet. It also influenced American interactions with Great Britain, whose powerful Hudson's Bay Company competed for Upper Missouri furs. Barbour shows how Indians, mixed-bloods, Hispanic-, African-, Anglo-, and other Euro-Americans living at Fort Union created a system of community law that helped maintain their unique frontier society. Many visiting artists and scientists produced a magnificent graphic and verbal record of events and people at the post, but the old-time world of fur traders and Indians collapsed during the Civil War when political winds shifted in favor of Lincoln's Republican Party. In 1865 Chouteau lost his trade license and sold Fort Union to new operators, who had little interest in maintaining the post's former culture. Barton H. Barbour is Professor of History at Boise State University and author of Jedidiah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

"By beginning where the standard works leave off and carrying the story up to its logical conclusion in 1865, this book fills a definite void in the history of the fur trade in the American West. Set in the upper Missouri country, which was bypassed by settlement until the 1860s, it focuses primarily upon the St. Louis firm of Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and Company, usually known as the American Fur Company....This is not the distorted and romanticized approach so typical of much of the literature on the earlier fur trade. Drama is inherent, but it is sound, well-conceived, carefully documented history."-American Historical Review

John Jacob Astor's dream of empire took shape as the American Fur Company. At Astor's retirement in 1834, this corporate monopoly reached 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 eighteen men who represented the American Fur Company and its successors in the Upper Missouri trade. Their biographies have been compiled from the classic ten-volume Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen. These chapters bring back movers and shapers of a great venture: Ramsay Crooks, the mountain man who headed the American Fur Company after Astor; Kenneth McKenzie, "King of the Missouri; " Gabriel Franchere, survivor of the Astorian disaster; Charles Larpenteur, commander of Fort Union and fur-trade chronicler. Here, too, are the fiery William Laidlaw, ambitious James Kipp and John Cabanne Sr., diplomatic David Dawson Mitchell and Malcolm Clark, goutish James A. Hamilton (Palmer), controversial John F. A. Sanford and Francis A. Chardon, easy-going William Gordon, and ill-fated William E. Vanderburgh. Completing this memorable cast are Alexander Culbertson, skilled hunter; Auguste Pike Vasquez, mountain man; Henry A. Boller, educated clerk; and Jean Baptiste Moncravie, trader and raconteur. Writing about these fur traders, trappers, and mountain men are Harvey L. Carter, Carl P. Russell, Ray H. Mattison, Janet Lecompte, John E. Wickman, Charles E. Hanson Jr., and Louis Pfaller. Scott Eckberg, historian at the Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, provides a historical overview in his introduction. LeRoy R. Hafen is theeditor of Mountain Men and Fur Traders of the Far West: Eighteen Biographical Sketches and Trappers of the Far West: Sixteen Biographical Sketches (both Bison Books).