The French and Indian War opened up the fur trade for Scots. They developed their own "model" of country marriage that evolved into a horizontal "clan" system stretching across the continent. Scots "married-in" to Native communities and encouraged other employees, including the French Canadians and Hawaiian kanaka laborers and their own Scots-Indian sons to do likewise. They married their daughters to newcomers, thereby bringing them into the network as well. This pattern can be identified by researching fur trade genealogies. Over time dowries replaced bride prices and marriage became a formal affair, written contract, before a justice of the peace or in a church rather than an oral agreement.European fathers began to employ ideological institutions like schools and church which taught their daughter to act according to social standards such as the "Cult of Domesticity." Native women had had a long history of adapting European trade goods into Native fashion and altering their traditional clothing styles to accommodate new lifeways, but now the daughters were expected to dress according to their European social status. The daughters of the country were now seen as assimilated and to have "married-out" of their Indian cultures and into the Euro American culture. In order to move Indian lands into the trade network and thereby the public sphere these mixed-blood women were considered assimilated and these European-Indian marriages were deemed legal and binding Americans traveled across the North American continent expecting to find an empty wilderness in which to plant their own version of the Puritans "city on the hill." They took with them ideologies about the frontier, wilderness, and Indians, especially the "Indian Princess." Captivity narratives had been used by the Puritans to establish social conformity and their morality code continued to permeate American lives 200 years later as thousands left the United States for the Pacific Northwest. Rather than a barren wilderness they found an already established agricultural community operated by the London based Hudson's Bay Company. This "imagined community" had schools, churches, a cemetery, a lumber mill, produced grain and had a mill, as well as orchards, gardens, and livestock.

This journal covers the 1831 through 1832 period when Work was frequently with the Flathead and Pend d' Oreilles Indians.

For all of fur's contentious position in American culture today, historian Eric Jay Dolin shows its centrality in our nation's ever-surprising history. He argues that the trade in animal skins turned colonial America into a tumultuous frontier where global powers battled for control. From the seventeenth century right on up to the Gilded Age, the developed world's appetite for fur made the new continent, with its wealth of fur-bearing wildlife, a seemingly inexhaustible resource. The result was a major boost in the evolution of the colonies into a powerful new player on the world stage. Dolin sheds insight on the ways the fur trade created international tensions--in New England, the Great Lakes, and in the expanding West. Fur traders were often the first white men to map major rivers, forests, and mountains, then soon pushed Native Americans off their lands as John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company attempted to monopolize the West.--From publisher description.

Discusses the role of the Hudson's Bay Company and its fur traders in the exploration of northern B.C., the western NWT, the Yukon and eastern Alaska.

The Pacific Northwest Metis (Indian-white mixed bloods) paved the way for Oregon-bound emigrants by linking two cultures in collision. Jackson recalls the history of this unique and underrated minority.