This dual biography highlights the human dimensions of the Upper Missouri fur trade. Focusing on two major figures, Alexander Culbertson (1809-1879), trader with the American Fur Company, founder of Fort Benton, and the first white American to live among the Blackfeet Indians, and his wife, Natoyist-Siksina' ("Holy Snake") (1825-1893), daughter of Two Suns, the chief of the Blood (Kainah) tribe, Lesley Wischmann shows the great influence this couple had on the region. Culbertson and Natoyist-Siksina' worked together for thirty years to promote cooperative relations between Native...

In the mid-1800s, Andrew Dawson, self-exiled from his home in Scotland, joined the upper Missouri River fur trade and rose through the ranks of the American Fur Company. A headstrong young man, he had come to America at the age of twenty-four after being dismissed from his second job in two years. His poignant sense of isolation is evident throughout his letters home between 1844 and 1861. In "This Far-Off Wild Land," Lesley Wischmann and Andrew Erskine Dawson a relative of this colorful figure couple an engaging biography of Dawson with thirty-seven of his previously unpublished letters...