New article and book on the Upper Missouri
Oct 21, 2011 22:44:55 GMT -7
Post by Rod on Oct 21, 2011 22:44:55 GMT -7
I just got an email from Andy Banta, superintendant at Ft. Union, concerning a new article in the North Dakota Historical Society Quarterly on James Kipp, written by Ray Wood. The email is as follows:
LEGENDARY FUR TRADER JAMES KIPP, FORT CLARK TRADING POST SITE FEATURED IN
NEW ISSUE OF NORTH DAKOTA HISTORY
BISMARCK -- The latest edition of North Dakota History focuses on one of
the most important fur traders on the Northern Plains: James Kipp. A
prominent member of two 19th Century fur trading companies, Kipp’s story
has not been fully explored until this issue of North Dakota History,
written by the eminent scholar W. Raymond Wood, who has spent his
professional life studying the archaeology and history of the central and
northern Plains. A brief accompanying article, “From the Sites: Fort Clark
State Historic Site” details the Mandan, and later Arikara, village
Mih-tutta-hang-kusch and neighboring trading posts Fort Clark and Primeau’s
Post.
North Dakota History is the quarterly journal published since 1926 by the
state’s history agency, the State Historical Society of North Dakota
(SHSND).
Kipp’s trading career on the Missouri River spans almost the entire history
of the trade – from 1822 to 1859. Wood’s article, “James Kipp: Upper
Missouri Fur Trader and Missouri River Farmer,” discusses the long life of
the Canadian-born carpenter, trader, and businessman. He is credited with
designing or building most of the American Fur Company’s trading posts,
including Fort Clark, Fort Union, and Fort Berthold in today’s North
Dakota. His assistance to artists and scientists like George Catlin, Karl
Bodmer, Prince Maximilian, and others was invaluable and helped to create
one of the most complete contemporary records of the encounter of Indian
nations with the advancing Euro-American culture.
James Kipp was born into a family of Loyalists who, after the Revolutionary
War, fled New York for Nova Scotia, and then Quebec. Before he was 20,
Kipp was employed by the North West Company on the Red River just south of
the Canadian border. When the War of 1812 began, he returned to Canada,
became a carpenter, and married; after his wife’s death in 1821, Kipp left
his daughters with his mother and headed back west to resume his career as
a fur trader, soon joining the Columbia Fur Company on the Missouri River.
One of Kipp’s first assignments was to revive the trade with the Mandans,
and by the spring of 1823, Kipp was constructing a post on the Missouri
River near the mouth of the Knife River, just downstream from the Mandan
village of Mih-tutta-hang-kusch. That first fort was soon replaced with
another fort closer to the village. In 1827, after the Columbia Fur
Company merged with the American Fur Company, Kipp joined the new
organization, and within a few years, built a third post, known as Fort
Clark, beside the village. Married to a Mandan woman and fluent in the
Mandan language, Kipp’s knowledge of Mandan customs and language was
invaluable to the artist George Catlin, who spent a considerable amount of
time at Fort Clark as Kipp’s guest in 1832. Kipp also was instrumental in
Catlin’s being allowed to view the four-day Mandan Okipa and other
ceremonies. When Prince Maximilian and the artist Karl Bodmer arrived the
next year, they also were housed with Kipp, his wife, and their
two-year-old son. Without Kipp’s assistance Maximilian would not have been
able to prepare his detailed reports of the life of the Mandan people.
Kipp probably met every significant historical figure that traveled on the
Missouri during the course of his long career. Besides Maximilian, Bodmer,
Catlin, and Schoolcraft, he also knew French scientist Joseph Nicollet,
Lieutenant John C. Fremont, Father Pierre-Jean de Smet, and almost everyone
involved in one way or another with the fur trade in the West. Many
relatives, including three nephews, were also involved in the trade.
In 1839, at age 51, Kipp also entered a downstream marriage, to 25-year-old
Mary Bloodgood in Missouri. A few years later he bought a farm north of
Kansas City, near the current site of the Kansas City International
Airport, and Mary stayed home to take care of the farm while Kipp was on
the Upper Missouri. In the fall, Kipp usually led a pack train some 2,000
miles up the river, carrying European and American goods to trade with the
Native people of the Upper Missouri. In the spring he would lead trips
down the Missouri River to St. Louis with a fleet of keelboats or Mackinaws
loaded with furs. He continued this pattern well into his 60s.
In the 1840s, when the Hidatsa and Mandan people, hard-hit by a series of
smallpox and other epidemics, settled in the new village of
Like-a-Fishhook, Kipp and Frances Chardon followed, building the new post
of Fort Berthold, where Kipp acted as bourgeois, or director, for most of
his remaining years on the Upper Missouri. It was here that Kipp married
another Mandan woman, Sak-we-ah-ki (Earth Woman), the daughter of Mato-Tope
(Four Bears) and possibly of his favorite wife, Mink. Their only known
child, Joseph Kipp, was born in 1849.
His last few years in the fur trade Kipp spent as the bourgeois at Fort
Union. He retired to his farm in Missouri at the age of 71 in 1859, where
the next year’s federal census records showed James and Mary Kipp, as well
as Kipp’s son by his first Mandan wife, Samuel, Samuel’s wife, Mariah, and
their two children living on the farm. Kipp continued to make regular
visits up the Missouri River to Earth Woman, Joseph, and his old friends on
the Upper Missouri River. Finally, age caught up with the old trader, and
in 1878, when he could no longer travel, he ended a letter to Joseph, “Give
my love to your mother and all the family. I remain affectionately,
Father.” James Kipp died July 2, 1880, at the age of 92.
W. Raymond Wood is professor emeritus at the University of
Missouri-Columbia. He has spent his professional life studying the
archaeology and history of the central and northern Plains. Dr. Wood is the
author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and articles, including
several for North Dakota History. His latest book, Fort Clark and its
Indian Neighbors: A Trading Post on the Upper Missouri, was published this
October by the University of Oklahoma Press. Also this year A
White-Bearded Plainsman: The Memoirs of Archaeologist W. Raymond Wood was
released, and in 2008 the State Historical Society of North Dakota
published Wood’s Twilight of the Upper Missouri River Fur Trade: The
Journals of Henry A. Boller.
A companion piece in the latest North Dakota History, “From the Sites: Fort
Clark State Historic Site,” examines the one of the most important
archaeological sites on the northern Plains, Fort Clark. James Kipp built
three trading posts there, and spent much of his career with the Mandan and
Arikara at the site, which is known today for its significant
documentation, association with the devastating 1837 smallpox epidemic, and
the multiple cultures who lived and worked there. The article was written
by SHSND Assistant Editor Bonnie T. Johnson.
The Mandan village, Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, was founded in 1822 and Kipp’s
trading posts near the village soon followed. Steamboats began arriving at
Fort Clark in 1832, delivering trade goods to the fort and returning to St.
Louis with beaver pelts and bison robes. In 1837 a steamboat also brought
smallpox, documented by Fort Clark trader Francis A. Chardon in a journal
he kept at the fort. By the spring of 1837 as many as 90 percent of the
residents of Mih-tutta-hang-kusch were dead of smallpox, and the surviving
villagers moved further upstream. The Arikaras, who had been living just
downriver from Fort Clark settled into the largely empty village, and Fort
Clark and its competitor, Primeau’s Post, continued in operation until the
early 1860s, when the villagers moved to Like-a-Fishhook Village and the
traders to Fort Berthold.
The area including Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, Fort Clark, and Primeau’s Post
became Fort Clark Trading Post State Historic Site in 1936.
Archaeologists, including W. Raymond Wood, have excavated the site since
the 1960s. Combined with the extensive 30-year documentary record of
visitors to Fort Clark, the recent studies help us understand the
complicated history of Fort Clark and Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, and the
interactions between Native, European, and Euro-American people living
there. Today, interpretive trails and signs explain the era of the two
competing fur trading posts as well as two different American Indian
cultures, all sharing the same site in a very short span of time. The
archaeological site is located between Washburn and Stanton, and is open
May 16 through September 15.
An excellent teaching tool for history and other related
classes, North Dakota History is available for $14.95 plus tax at local
bookstores and newsstands, the North Dakota Heritage Center Museum Store in
Bismarck, or by mail order. To order, write the State Historical Society
of North Dakota, 612 East Boulevard Avenue, Bismarck, ND 58505, call (701)
328-2666, or e-mail histsoc@nd.gov. Add $2 to cover shipping for the first
copy and 50 cents for each additional copy. For more information, contact
the State Historical Society’s website at www.history.nd.gov.
Subscriptions to North Dakota History are offered as a benefit of
membership in the SHSND Foundation, a private, non-profit organization
which supports programs and activities of the State Historical Society.
For information or to join, write to the Foundation at P.O. Box 1976,
Bismarck, ND 58502, call (701) 222-1966, e-mail hstlfdn@btinet.net, or
visit the Society’s website.
Looks to be a good one---I was given a manuscript copy of Ray's article to critique about a year ago, even though it was the rough draft it was extremely informtive. Ray Wood's new book on the history of Ft. Clark is also now out from University of Oklahoma, I've got a copy and can't wait to read it through. Great resources for the Upper Missouri fur trade.
Rod
LEGENDARY FUR TRADER JAMES KIPP, FORT CLARK TRADING POST SITE FEATURED IN
NEW ISSUE OF NORTH DAKOTA HISTORY
BISMARCK -- The latest edition of North Dakota History focuses on one of
the most important fur traders on the Northern Plains: James Kipp. A
prominent member of two 19th Century fur trading companies, Kipp’s story
has not been fully explored until this issue of North Dakota History,
written by the eminent scholar W. Raymond Wood, who has spent his
professional life studying the archaeology and history of the central and
northern Plains. A brief accompanying article, “From the Sites: Fort Clark
State Historic Site” details the Mandan, and later Arikara, village
Mih-tutta-hang-kusch and neighboring trading posts Fort Clark and Primeau’s
Post.
North Dakota History is the quarterly journal published since 1926 by the
state’s history agency, the State Historical Society of North Dakota
(SHSND).
Kipp’s trading career on the Missouri River spans almost the entire history
of the trade – from 1822 to 1859. Wood’s article, “James Kipp: Upper
Missouri Fur Trader and Missouri River Farmer,” discusses the long life of
the Canadian-born carpenter, trader, and businessman. He is credited with
designing or building most of the American Fur Company’s trading posts,
including Fort Clark, Fort Union, and Fort Berthold in today’s North
Dakota. His assistance to artists and scientists like George Catlin, Karl
Bodmer, Prince Maximilian, and others was invaluable and helped to create
one of the most complete contemporary records of the encounter of Indian
nations with the advancing Euro-American culture.
James Kipp was born into a family of Loyalists who, after the Revolutionary
War, fled New York for Nova Scotia, and then Quebec. Before he was 20,
Kipp was employed by the North West Company on the Red River just south of
the Canadian border. When the War of 1812 began, he returned to Canada,
became a carpenter, and married; after his wife’s death in 1821, Kipp left
his daughters with his mother and headed back west to resume his career as
a fur trader, soon joining the Columbia Fur Company on the Missouri River.
One of Kipp’s first assignments was to revive the trade with the Mandans,
and by the spring of 1823, Kipp was constructing a post on the Missouri
River near the mouth of the Knife River, just downstream from the Mandan
village of Mih-tutta-hang-kusch. That first fort was soon replaced with
another fort closer to the village. In 1827, after the Columbia Fur
Company merged with the American Fur Company, Kipp joined the new
organization, and within a few years, built a third post, known as Fort
Clark, beside the village. Married to a Mandan woman and fluent in the
Mandan language, Kipp’s knowledge of Mandan customs and language was
invaluable to the artist George Catlin, who spent a considerable amount of
time at Fort Clark as Kipp’s guest in 1832. Kipp also was instrumental in
Catlin’s being allowed to view the four-day Mandan Okipa and other
ceremonies. When Prince Maximilian and the artist Karl Bodmer arrived the
next year, they also were housed with Kipp, his wife, and their
two-year-old son. Without Kipp’s assistance Maximilian would not have been
able to prepare his detailed reports of the life of the Mandan people.
Kipp probably met every significant historical figure that traveled on the
Missouri during the course of his long career. Besides Maximilian, Bodmer,
Catlin, and Schoolcraft, he also knew French scientist Joseph Nicollet,
Lieutenant John C. Fremont, Father Pierre-Jean de Smet, and almost everyone
involved in one way or another with the fur trade in the West. Many
relatives, including three nephews, were also involved in the trade.
In 1839, at age 51, Kipp also entered a downstream marriage, to 25-year-old
Mary Bloodgood in Missouri. A few years later he bought a farm north of
Kansas City, near the current site of the Kansas City International
Airport, and Mary stayed home to take care of the farm while Kipp was on
the Upper Missouri. In the fall, Kipp usually led a pack train some 2,000
miles up the river, carrying European and American goods to trade with the
Native people of the Upper Missouri. In the spring he would lead trips
down the Missouri River to St. Louis with a fleet of keelboats or Mackinaws
loaded with furs. He continued this pattern well into his 60s.
In the 1840s, when the Hidatsa and Mandan people, hard-hit by a series of
smallpox and other epidemics, settled in the new village of
Like-a-Fishhook, Kipp and Frances Chardon followed, building the new post
of Fort Berthold, where Kipp acted as bourgeois, or director, for most of
his remaining years on the Upper Missouri. It was here that Kipp married
another Mandan woman, Sak-we-ah-ki (Earth Woman), the daughter of Mato-Tope
(Four Bears) and possibly of his favorite wife, Mink. Their only known
child, Joseph Kipp, was born in 1849.
His last few years in the fur trade Kipp spent as the bourgeois at Fort
Union. He retired to his farm in Missouri at the age of 71 in 1859, where
the next year’s federal census records showed James and Mary Kipp, as well
as Kipp’s son by his first Mandan wife, Samuel, Samuel’s wife, Mariah, and
their two children living on the farm. Kipp continued to make regular
visits up the Missouri River to Earth Woman, Joseph, and his old friends on
the Upper Missouri River. Finally, age caught up with the old trader, and
in 1878, when he could no longer travel, he ended a letter to Joseph, “Give
my love to your mother and all the family. I remain affectionately,
Father.” James Kipp died July 2, 1880, at the age of 92.
W. Raymond Wood is professor emeritus at the University of
Missouri-Columbia. He has spent his professional life studying the
archaeology and history of the central and northern Plains. Dr. Wood is the
author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and articles, including
several for North Dakota History. His latest book, Fort Clark and its
Indian Neighbors: A Trading Post on the Upper Missouri, was published this
October by the University of Oklahoma Press. Also this year A
White-Bearded Plainsman: The Memoirs of Archaeologist W. Raymond Wood was
released, and in 2008 the State Historical Society of North Dakota
published Wood’s Twilight of the Upper Missouri River Fur Trade: The
Journals of Henry A. Boller.
A companion piece in the latest North Dakota History, “From the Sites: Fort
Clark State Historic Site,” examines the one of the most important
archaeological sites on the northern Plains, Fort Clark. James Kipp built
three trading posts there, and spent much of his career with the Mandan and
Arikara at the site, which is known today for its significant
documentation, association with the devastating 1837 smallpox epidemic, and
the multiple cultures who lived and worked there. The article was written
by SHSND Assistant Editor Bonnie T. Johnson.
The Mandan village, Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, was founded in 1822 and Kipp’s
trading posts near the village soon followed. Steamboats began arriving at
Fort Clark in 1832, delivering trade goods to the fort and returning to St.
Louis with beaver pelts and bison robes. In 1837 a steamboat also brought
smallpox, documented by Fort Clark trader Francis A. Chardon in a journal
he kept at the fort. By the spring of 1837 as many as 90 percent of the
residents of Mih-tutta-hang-kusch were dead of smallpox, and the surviving
villagers moved further upstream. The Arikaras, who had been living just
downriver from Fort Clark settled into the largely empty village, and Fort
Clark and its competitor, Primeau’s Post, continued in operation until the
early 1860s, when the villagers moved to Like-a-Fishhook Village and the
traders to Fort Berthold.
The area including Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, Fort Clark, and Primeau’s Post
became Fort Clark Trading Post State Historic Site in 1936.
Archaeologists, including W. Raymond Wood, have excavated the site since
the 1960s. Combined with the extensive 30-year documentary record of
visitors to Fort Clark, the recent studies help us understand the
complicated history of Fort Clark and Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, and the
interactions between Native, European, and Euro-American people living
there. Today, interpretive trails and signs explain the era of the two
competing fur trading posts as well as two different American Indian
cultures, all sharing the same site in a very short span of time. The
archaeological site is located between Washburn and Stanton, and is open
May 16 through September 15.
An excellent teaching tool for history and other related
classes, North Dakota History is available for $14.95 plus tax at local
bookstores and newsstands, the North Dakota Heritage Center Museum Store in
Bismarck, or by mail order. To order, write the State Historical Society
of North Dakota, 612 East Boulevard Avenue, Bismarck, ND 58505, call (701)
328-2666, or e-mail histsoc@nd.gov. Add $2 to cover shipping for the first
copy and 50 cents for each additional copy. For more information, contact
the State Historical Society’s website at www.history.nd.gov.
Subscriptions to North Dakota History are offered as a benefit of
membership in the SHSND Foundation, a private, non-profit organization
which supports programs and activities of the State Historical Society.
For information or to join, write to the Foundation at P.O. Box 1976,
Bismarck, ND 58502, call (701) 222-1966, e-mail hstlfdn@btinet.net, or
visit the Society’s website.
Looks to be a good one---I was given a manuscript copy of Ray's article to critique about a year ago, even though it was the rough draft it was extremely informtive. Ray Wood's new book on the history of Ft. Clark is also now out from University of Oklahoma, I've got a copy and can't wait to read it through. Great resources for the Upper Missouri fur trade.
Rod