Reviews for Labor, Industry, and Regulation during the Progressive Era

The average rating for Labor, Industry, and Regulation during the Progressive Era based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-11-04 00:00:00 Nicholas Fioretti This is an extended review of this class book on the 19th century fur trade. Andrew Henry, William Ashley, William Sublette, Jedediah Smith, and Manuel Lisa. Any of these names are familiar to students of the American fur trade of the Rocky Mountains in the first half of the 19th Century. The stories of their exploits, along with those of other well known contemporaries in the American fur trade, are at the heart of the romantic vision of the American West that has come down to students of the fur trade. Their hardy and rugged way of life allowed them to survive and prosper in the inhospitable environment of the Rocky Mountains, and their efforts helped to pave the way for the advance of American society across the American West. Or so we have been led to believe. In The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807 - 1840, David Wishart paints quite a different picture than the one described above. To begin with, he abandons the typical approach of seeing fur trappers as a collection of individuals whose trademark was their freedom of action. Instead, he chooses a regional approach to describe the fur trade, rather than an individual one. He further demonstrates that fur trappers did not enjoy great freedom of action, but in fact their activities were closely circumscribed by their environment. Wishart chooses to organize the American fur trade into two main regions. The first is the Northern Great Plains region. The trade here is centered on the Missouri River and its tributaries. The usual strategy was for the traders to erect a fort/trading post in close vicinity to an Indian village, and near a major river. This convenient arrangement allowed the traders easy and cheap water transport the furs they acquired. The fort/post needed to be near the villages of the Native Americans because they were the primary sources of the furs. The primary item of trade was the bison robe. Though the furs of smaller animals were also traded on the Northern Plains, the vast herds of bison that roamed the Plains made the bison robe the trade item of choice. In return for killing the bison and making the skin into a robe, the Indians were able to trade for various European trade items they desired. The second region Wishart describes is the Rocky Mountain region. Here, small fur-bearing animals, beaver especially, were the most common trade item, as hunting by the trappers quickly eliminated buffalo west of the Rocky Mountains. The beaver were sometimes caught by the fur traders themselves, the mountain men of our romantic histories, and sometimes by Indians to trade for European goods. The furs acquired could be trading at trading post/forts, as on the Northern Plains, but from 1825 to 1840 most trading was done at the yearly rendezvous site. The rendezvous was, in essence, a combination of a trade fair and a carnival. Fur trappers would gather once a year to exchange their furs for new supplies to continue the hunt the next year. Native Americans would trade their furs for trade items they desired, especially guns and powder. Following the trading, everyone would engage in gambling, drinking, and various contests of skill. Such is the geographic division that Wishart describes. While this is important and useful, it does not, by itself, make for a very compelling argument. The real importance of the analysis Wishart provides is in his description of how the fur trader's choice of action was closely controlled by his environment. To begin with, hunting beaver could only take place at certain times of the year. In winter, the streams are frozen, and the Rocky Mountains are too cold to operate outside. In the summer, the beaver pelts would be too thin, and thus less valuable. So, the hunt would mainly take place in the spring and fall. In addition, some areas were richer in furs than others. The Snake River and tributaries, and the Three Forks of the Missouri, were notoriously good beaver areas, while the Great Basin was notoriously poor because it contains fewer streams. Another restriction on the trappers was the willingness of the Indians to allow their lands to be trapped. The Blackfoot were the implacable enemies of the fur trappers for most of the fur trade period. Expeditions to the Three Forks of the Missouri, or any other Blackfoot lands, needed to be large and well-armed for protection against possible Blackfoot attack. Others, such as the Crow, proved more willing to trade. Indeed, Wishart notes on several occasions the exceptional skills of Crow women at preparing furs once the beaver were caught. The beaver themselves placed restrictions on the trappers. Slow to reproduce, extensive trapping of the beavers in an area led to population decline in just two or three years. Operating from an exploitative mindset, rather than a conservationist one, trappers made no effort to moderate their hunting to preserve beaver populations. This was not a problem for the bison robe traders of the Northern Plains. Not that the traders on the Northern Plains cared about treating bison as a renewable resource. The bison herds were simply too large to be impacted by the volume of trade in bison robes in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. (The middle decades of that century are a different story, but that lies outside Wishart's analysis.) Finally, and most importantly, Wishart describes the economic constraints imposed on the fur traders. In short, suppliers had the fur traders by the throat. The trade caravan that was sent to the rendezvous once per year was the only chance to acquire supplies for the next trapping season. The prices of these goods were marked up to an astronomical level, to the point where suppliers could average a 600 percent profit (198). Consequently, few trappers were ever able to profit from their efforts. Despite his efforts to shatter the myths surrounding the fur trapper, Wishart does acknowledge certain positive contributions they made. Foremost among these contributions was the geographical knowledge of the West that they were able to share. Through the trappers, the locations and descriptions of mountains, rivers, and other physical features were brought into sharper focus. But finally, he concludes with this less than complementary statement: In comparison with later stages of frontier settlement the fur trade barely scratched the surface of the West. The trappers and traders were too few in number, too limited in technology, and too focused on their objective of exploitation for it to be otherwise. The fur trade did, however, set the pace for subsequent Euro-American activity in the West. The attitude of rapacious, short-term exploitation which was imprinted during the fur trade persisted after 1840 as the focus shifted from furs to minerals, timber, land, and water (212). I found this book to be very enlightening and believe that others both inside and outside the field will find it a useful description of the American fur trade. By placing the fur trade in its actual economic and environmental context, Wishart helps clarify what the fur trade truly entailed. The book contains several useful maps detailing the area being described. There are also many tables detailing the volume of trade at various locations, the prices paid for goods, and so forth. There are even diagrams of the standard layout of a trading post/fort. Combined with Wishart's clear and thorough narrative, these maps and tables help to clarify and quantify the extent of the fur trade. The one item I did not find helpful was the spatial diagrams that attempted to explain certain aspects of the fur trade. They provided me with confusion instead of clarification. The narrative was strong enough that they were unnecessary.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-09 00:00:00 Laura Wilson This is one of my favorite books on the fur trade. It goes into great detail both geographically and economically on the trade. Wishart is a geographer by trade and is a professor at the University of Nebraska. For those that read these books, you know that's one of the main universities to put out fur trade histories. The maps are a real highlight of this book. Each chapter or section has one, with clear routes, rendezvous locations, and even how long it took to go up or downriver. Really, a great resource. I like how the strategy is laid out as well as what happened in various seasons. Lots of names and dates that are great for putting a timeline together. This is a great resource for historians and an informative read for the general public.