Fort Tecumseh and Fort Pierre Chouteau

"The Fort Tecumseh and Fort Pierre journal and letter books are of great value to fur trade researchers interested in tracing the movements of individuals, determining the sequence of events in a certain place, or any number of related subjects. . . . the overall volume offers a fairly riviting read for a general audience. Not only does this book offer unique insight into the daily life of mid-nineteenth century trade posts, it is also full of intrigue, office politics, theft, the occasional murder, and even some explosions."— Lotte Govaerts for North Dakota History

“A useful tool for those interested in the daily operation of the forts and the history of the Fur Companies and general life of the soldiers, Native Americans, and daily problems. A wonderful addition to history research.”— Independent Book Publishers Association

“Few geographic locations in the West exhibit a greater concentration of sites of . . . historic fur- and Indian-trade establishments, or one covering a longer time span, than that of the junction of the Bad and the Missouri Rivers.”— G. Hubert Smith

No other part of the West saw such a succession of trading posts as did the heart of modern-day South Dakota, where the Bad River meets the Missouri near the contemporary town of Fort Pierre. Various firms established posts here starting in 1817. Two of these posts, Fort Tecumseh (1822) and Fort Pierre Chouteau (1832), reached their golden age under the American Fur Company in the 1830s and 1840s.

While company employees recorded daily activities in journals, they relayed company business as well as personal information about the individuals at the post in letter books. Letter books, which contained copies of all outgoing correspondence, were once common items at all posts on the upper Missouri, but only a few survive today. Those that do vividly illustrate the nature of commerce on the Northern Great Plains during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Editors Michael M. Casler and W. Raymond Wood transcribed and annotated these rare documents, including some translated from the original French. Known for over a century, the Fort Tecumseh journal and the letter books from Fort Tecumseh and Fort Pierre Chouteau are published here in their entirety for the first time.

Michael M. Casler is a former park ranger with the National Park Service. Casler is currently working as an independent historical researcher. Casler is the author of Steamboats of the Fort Union Fur Trade (1999) and editor of The Original Journals of Charles Larpenteur (2007). He has also written numerous articles on the Upper Missouri fur trade from his home in Williston, North Dakota.

W. Raymond Wood received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Oregon and taught anthropology at the University of Missouri for nearly four decades. Among his many publications are Prologue to Lewis and Clark (2002), Twilight of the Upper Missouri River Fur Trade (2008), and A White-Bearded Plainsman: The Memoirs of Archaeologist W. Raymond Wood (2011). He co-authored Fort Tecumseh and Fort Pierre Chouteau, Journal and Letter Books 1830–1850 (2017) and Fort Union and Fort William: Letter Book and Journal, 1833–1835 (2020), both by SDHS Press. He passed away on October 2, 2020.