David J. Wishart

Cultures in co-operation and conflict: Indians in the fur trade on the northern Great Plains, 1807–1840

Abstract The fur trade on the northern Great Plains from 1807 to 1840 may be viewed as an alliance between two sets of cultures each with a demand for the others products. The Indians role in this fur trade was crucial: he produced the robes and furs, provisioned the traders and greatly influenced the pattern of trading post locations. The fur trade functioned successfully only by adjusting its system of operations to the existing patterns of Indian occupance and by working within those limits to encourage the production of robes and furs. Properly conducted, the fur trade fitted well with the Indians way of life. Nevertheless, in the process of this culture contact the relationship between the trader and the Indian soured, and the trader became an agent in the destruction of Indian populations and the modification of Indian cultures.

Leslie Hewes, 1906 – 1999

n the weeks following the death of Leslie Hewes—in his sleep on March 7, 1999 at his home in Lincoln, Nebraska—a large pile of his books and journals that had not been deposited in archives was placed on a table in the coffee room in the Department of Geography for all comers to take. As the pile was winnowed and reduced, it was revealed that every item, no matter how obscure, had been carefully read by Hewes. Each one bore the thick scrawl of his number 3 pencil (his former graduate students will recall, perhaps with latent trepidation, that trademark) noting a relevant statistic, acknowledging a good point, dismissing an error or a careless idea. Here was the signature of a scholar, a man who never stopped learning or doing geography in a long and distinguished career. In one of his last publications (1996b), written when he was almost ninety years old, Hewes recreated the pioneer landscape of Mount Hope, near Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory, the place where he was born on February 25, 1906. His father, Willis, was one of the original homesteaders who had come into the Territory in the land rush of April 22, 1889; his mother, Pearl, followed in 1890 in a covered wagon from Minnesota. Hewes grew up on a farm in this rural community of spare frame and log houses, wheat and cotton fields, nurtured orchards, and resilient people. He grew up poor: his father died young, leaving his mother to raise the family (there were three sisters and two half-brothers) frugally. Often there was insufficient food to eat; sometimes school was missed because there were not enough wearable shoes to go around. By the time he was in high school in Guthrie, Hewes had realized, as he put it in an unpublished recollection, “that any chance for recognition and improvement lay in academic achievement.” Fortunately, at that time the University of Oklahoma did not charge residents for tuition. Initially, Hewes was a Spanish major, but early in his junior year, he was appointed as a teaching assistant in geography after the graduate student who had filled the position became ill. Early teachers—Ruth McDill, George Wood, Clyde Bollinger, and C. W. Thornthwaite— encouraged him in this course. Earning As in every course, except for ROTC where he was downgraded to a B for “excessive absences,” Hewes graduated in 1928. Thornthwaite directed him to Berkeley, his own alma mater, for graduate work. At Berkeley, Hewes came under the powerful I