Like the cowboy, the frontier trader has been so wrapped in myth that our understanding of who he was and what he did is largely shaped by stereotype: the Indian trader, for example - gunrunner, trader in slaves, and corrupter of the noble red man - or the mountain man, variously seen as romantic wilderness hero or degenerate white savage.
Examining these and other myths, Lamar shows that early trade was, on the contrary, one of the first and most successful ways red men and white communicated, that traders were not snakes in America's western Eden but participants in a vigorous if...