LeRoy R. Hafen (1893–1985)

Originally published in 1938, then reprinted in 1984. Fort Laramie was originally a fur trading fort on the North Platte in what’s now Wyoming. It was eventually purchased by the US Army to guard emigrant trails; it was at a convenient location where emigrants could rest and refit before continuing north to the Montana gold fields, south to Denver and the Colorado silver mines, or west to Oregon, California, or Utah. It was the site of the 1851 Fort Laramie peace council and treaty – a subject that came up recently in the controversy about the Keystone Pipeline – and was the base post for the 1854 Grattan Massacre (Brule Sioux warriors versus US Army; Sioux won) and the 1855 Harney Massacre (US Army versus Brule Sioux women and children; US Army won). After the 1850s, Fort Laramie was no longer at the center of Indian warfare; authors LeRoy Hafen and Francis Marion Young invoke their “Pageant of the West” subtitle and cover other events and places in the Indian Wars, including Bent’s Fort, the Sand Creek Massacre; the Fetterman Massacre; the Wagon Box Fight; the Battle of the Rosebud, and, of course, the Little Bighorn.

An easy read. The authors are generally sympathetic to Native Americans for their time and place (1930s in Wyoming). Illustrations are period plans and drawings of the fort. Appendices are a US Army survey of the fort from 1875, a list of the buildings present in 1882, and a list of things sold at auction when the fort was sold in 1890.… (meer)

Flickering glimpses of the shadowy lives of French-surnamed fur trappers and traders of the West in the first half of the nineteen century. The biographical information on these men is scant and it is hard to distinguish one life from another, but together they yield a fragmentary mosaic of life on the fringe of civilization.

This is a reprinting of an older collection and the pieces are written in a folksy style free of sociological editorializing. While it is impossible to conceive of any reputable historian using this manner today, I can't help but think that the figures chronicled here would recognize themselves more clearly in these texts than they would in the thickets of jargon that plague much of contemporary historiography.… (meer)