Frontier Diplomats. The Life And Times Of Alexander Culbertson And Nat

LESLEY WISCHMANN

Publication: The Arthur H Clark Co, 2000, Spokane

First edition. Red cloth with gilt stamping on cover and spine, maps on endpapers, 400pp., acknowledgments, introduction, illustrated, epilogue, bibliography, index. This may well be one of the best fur trade history books in a number of years. It is a history of the Upper Missouri River, the American Fur Company,the Upper Missouri Indian tribes, and western expansion. LeRoy Hafen's The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, devotes only four pages to Culbertson, and for his importance and contributions, this is not enough. Culbertson and his Blood tribe wife Natoyist-Siksina worked together to create good relations with the Upper Missouri Indian tribes. The two worked for more than thirty years to forge relations between whites and the tribes of the area. Culbertson founded and built Fort Benton, and had a reputation as an honest trader which helped to negotiate the end of the 1833 Crow siege of Fort MacKenzie. He was instrumental in the success of the Fort Laramie Treaty Conference of 1851, guiding the 1853 Northern Pacific Railroad Survey party under Isaac Stevens, and played key roles in negotiating the treaty with the Blackfeet tribes in 1855, and other treaties in the years to follow. As new without dust jacket, as issued.

Inventory Number: 50736