Brave buffalo hunters, lazy Indians, Native women as beasts of burden - these are just some of the familiar images contained in fur traders' writings from the Columbia-Fraser Plateau. As the earliest "ethnographic" accounts of the Native peoples of northern North America, fur-trade records have long been mined for data by legal researchers, historians, and anthropologists. Traders' Tales provides the first sustained critical analysis of these fascinating historical documents.

Drawing on the latest techniques in ethnohistory and cultural and literary theory, Elizabeth Vibert unpacks...