Account of authors journey to and establishment of Fort Yukon where he spent the winter. Journal includes detailed observations on the Kutchin Indians and the surrounding area.

Excerpt from Journal of the Yukon, 1847-48 Alexander Hunter Murray, the author of this Journal, was born at Kilmun, Argyllshire, Scotland, in the year 1818. He emigrated to the United States as a young man, and joined the American Fur Company, with which he remained for several years. His service with the American Fur Company must have taken him pretty far afield, as witness his familiar references to Balize, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Red River of Texas, in the present Journal. In the spring of 1846, accompanied by the late Mr. Brazeau (afterward of Edmonton), he found his way from the Missouri to Fort Garry, where he entered the service of the Hudson's Bay Company as a senior clerk. He was appointed to the Mackenzie River District, under Chief Factor Murdoch McPherson, and set forth almost immediately for his post in the extreme north. His way lay by Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan to Cumberland House; thence by Frog portage to the Churchill, and by Methye portage (famous in the annals of the fur trade) to the river and lake Athabaska. Descending Slave river to Great Slave lake, he entered the mighty Mackenzie, and reported to the head of his department at Fort Simpson. Some where on his journey - perhaps at Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabaska - he had had the good fortune to meet the daughter of Chief Trader Colin Campbell, of the Athabaska District. After a brief courtship, they were married a la contract, by Chief Factor McPherson - there being no clergy so far north at that time. Murray and his young wife spent their honeymoon descending the Mackenzie, a long and, under the circumstances, no doubt delightful journey. Finally they reached the mouth of Peel river, and turned up to Fort McPherson, where they wintered. In the early spring Murray took his wife over the mountains to Lapierre House, on Bell river. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Alliance and Conflict combines a richly descriptive study of intersocietal relations in early nineteenth-century Northwest Alaska with a bold theoretical treatise on the structure of the world system as it might have been in ancient times. Ernest S. Burch Jr. illuminates one aspect of the traditional lives of the I_upiaq Eskimos in unparalleled detail and depth. Basing his account on observations made by early Western explorers, interviews with Native historians, and archeological research, Burch describes the social boundaries and geographic borders formerly existing in Northwest Alaska and the various kinds of transactions that took place across them. These ranged from violence of the most brutal sort, at one extreme, to relations of peace and friendship, at the other. Burch argues that the international system he describes approximated in many respects the type of system existing all over the world before the development of agriculture. Based on that assumption, he presents a series of hypotheses about what the world system may have been like when it consisted entirely of hunter-gatherer societies and about how it became more centralized with the evolution of chiefdoms. ø Accounts of specific people, places, and events add an immediate, experiential dimension to the work, complementing its theoretical apparatus and sweeping narrative scope. Provocative and comprehensive, Alliance and Conflict is a definitive look at the greater world of Native peoples of Northwest Alaska.

The Everett D. Graff Collection of Western Americana consists of some 10,000 books, manuscripts, maps, pamphlets, broadsides, broadsheets, and photographs, of which about half are described in the present catalogue. The Graff Collection displays the remarkable breadth of interest, knowledge, and taste of a great bibliophile and student of Western American history. From this rich collection, now in The Newberry Library, Chicago, its former Curator, Colton Storm, has compiled a discriminating and representative Catalogue of the rarer and more unusual materials. Collectors, bibliographers, librarians, historians, and book dealers specializing in Americana will find the Graff Catalogue an interesting and essential tool. Detailed collations and binding descriptions are cited, and many of the more important works have been annotated by Mr. Graff and Mr. Storm. An extensive index of persons and subjects makes the book useful to the scholar as well as to the collector and dealer. The book is not a bibliography but rather a guide to rare or unique source materials now enriching The Newberry Library's outstanding holdings in American history.