1906-7. TRANSACTIONS. " 81 



The Romance of the Fur- Trade. 



By Lawrence J. Burpee, Librarian Carnegie Library. 



[Read Feb. 8th, 1907. 



As the history of the fur-trade runs back into prehistoric 

 times, and the field is as wide as the earth, and as it is packed 

 with romance as far back as we can get any glimpse of it, any- 

 thing like an exhaustive treatment of the subject would be in- 

 expedient. A twenty-four hour lecture would no doubt be a 

 novelty, of one kind or another, but it may be wiser to sacrifice 

 completeness, even at the risk of being superficial. Limiting 

 the field, then, to North-Western America, it may be possible 

 to pick out a few incidents that will serve to illustrate, however 

 imperfectly, the romantic side of the fur trade; and incidentally 

 to suggest the rich mines of history and ethnology, of nature 

 and human nature, that we possess in the narratives of the 

 western fur traders. Such men as La Verendrye, Samuel Hearne, 

 Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser, David Thompson, 

 Umfreville, Franchere, Ross Cox, Harmon, the two Henrys, and 

 a score of others, have left behind them narratives of permanent 

 value and absorbing interest; the simple, unassuming records of 

 men of action; the stories of our western pathfinders and earliest 

 pioneers, who knew that wonderful land of boundless plains, 

 gigantic mountains, and vast inland seas as it was a hundred 

 years ago, while it was still in every sense the home of the Red 

 man. 



From first to last, the story of the western fur-trade and 

 the story of western exploration are one and indivisible. The 

 men who penetrated the west, who gradually pushed back the 

 veil of the unknown and revealed the vast proportions of our 

 continent, were in nearly every case fur-traders, and generally 

 members of one or other of the great fur-trading companies 

 whose trading posts marked, in more ways than one, the extreme 

 limits of civilization. In them the practical and ideal were 

 curiously blended. The one object of their lives was supposed 

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