(gentle music) Long before settlement of the Great Plains was a major consideration, European nations sent trappers and traders to delve into the American frontier.

(gentle music) (gentle music) Some of the earliest interactions between Europeans and native tribes on the Great Plains was about the business of fur, with large nations including Spain, France, England, and eventually the United States, vying for the rich resources of the North American continent.

To learn more about this business and the life of those trappers and traders who lived it, Don Rowlison welcomed historian, presenter, and a member of the American Mountain Man Association, Kevin Hiebert, to the Cottonwood Ranch.

The trade with the native Americans was part of the trapper's job too, because they always had trade goods, not only as a payment to go through the country, but to make friends and stuff.

Today we'll talk about some of the stuff they had and some of the incidents.

And so we have a guest today and I'll let him introduce himself.

My name is Kevin Hiebert.

I'm from, well, over in central Kansas there, the little town of Gossel, a fifth generation farmer and cattleman over there.

But my mother was a longtime history teacher there, Always had a interest in history there when other little boys was out playing baseball and football.

I was out hunting and roaming up and down the creeks and collecting Indian artifacts.

And we have a business called Bearpaw Traders.

It's kind of supporting the collecting habit and also gets me into some very interesting museum circles and gallery circles and different things also.

And so you've been doing this most of your life.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I'm a longtime member of an organization called the Brotherhood of the American Mountain Man, or the AMM.

They have different levels.

You have to be sponsored into the organization by existing members.

And then you can ascend to the higher level of the organization, which is called the Hiveranno.

Our organization there is highly dedicated to accurate history.

We are actually people actually out doing things that I mean, trapping beaver and horseback trips and exploring and actually living the life.

We also traveled north to the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska.

The research material there at the Museum of the Fur Trade, there at Chadron is just world-class.

It's pulled in a lot of major collectors and historians from around the country as contributors and part of the friends group and everything.

And just the wealth of knowledge there is just best in the world.

My name's Nakaya Fester.

I'm the director here at the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska.

The museum covers 500 years of history and the entire North American continent.

So our exhibits start up here with fishermen finding furs when Europeans came over for religious fasting days.

And then it goes clear down to the modern fur trade.

And we focus on the material culture.

Those are items that were traded and used.

We're here in Chadron because it is the site of an original trading post.

The Bordeaux Post has been reconstructed on its original footings in our outside exhibit gallery.

This site was chosen as the trading post location because the area across north of us on Highway 20 was actually a Brule winter camp.

Earlly means there was obtain traps through trade.

And that was the French method there of setting up basically a trading site and the natives bringing the pelts in.

And that was the means of the government factory system.

They would have the supply of goods and then the natives would bring the pelts in.

So the flags represent each of the different fur trade countries that would have traded.

So we have Vikings, we have Spanish, several American flags because fur trade went on through several different decades.

England, France, Russia for sure.

Canada is more in the Pacific North Coast.

So James Bordeaux worked for the American fur company out of Fort Laramie.

He'd spent his summers there trading and doing work for them and then he'd come here and trade.

Winter was prime because A, they were camped across the way and B, that's when the furs were most plentiful for thickness.

So he'd do his trading, load everything up, take it to Fort Laramie and then they'd ship it down to St. Louis.

And then the fur companies, I mean like Ashleigh and Henry Fur Company there that well, we can do one step better.

We'll send our own men out and bringing the furs in and stuff.

So that was early 1820s through probably about 1840.

And that was kind of considered the height of the fur trade.

I mean, a huge economic source there from the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company.

One of my favorite objects in the collection is this sword.

It's a chief factor sword.

These were swords that were made for the Hudson Bay Company governors.

There was only about 18 to 25 made.

Two are known to be in existence.

Ours and one in the Hudson Bay Company.

The cool thing about them is that they're monodrams so that we can trace who the sword belonged to and we have access to his service records and those kinds of historical facts.

So how did these get started?

A lot of them started as young men, but were they mostly out for adventure or were they out for adventure and to make money?

Well, yeah, it was a lot of different things there that I mean, probably one of the most famous things was Ashley and Henry's fur company there.

They put out an ad.

It just wanted 100 enterprising young men.

I mean, they said the men went to the mountains for a number of different reasons.

Some of them to make their wealth in pelt.

Some of them to escape basically pending jail sentence.

Ex-military men, just adventures.

A lot of them, just young men, but the fur companies that organized all the things and either you were considered a company man, all your needs were supplied by the fur companies or you were what's called a free trapper.

They were the ones that married.

usually had a native wife and were on their, as they said, on their own hook.

Where they would trade with whoever they wanted to, whenever they wanted to, and didn't have any ties to anyone.

Yeah, because the company trappers were more of a contract.

What we considered a contract.

Yeah.

That trapper today.

If they were doing that, they were looking for a company.

I mean, basically you started out as an indentured servant where they would supply your needs with the traps and firearms.

And I mean, this was a, it's a real good example.

This is a trap manufactured by a blacksmith in Miles Standish.

But he was a very good blacksmith.

And this particular style trap there was called a St. Louis pattern.

It's a single pin.

And I think there's references where Standish had made 150 of these for the American fur company.

And they were large and heavy and they were relatively expensive where these traps there would have cost a trapper there probably anywhere from $3 to $5 a piece there.

And for average wage there of a working man maybe making 50 cents a week or so, that it almost had to sign on to a fur company that to get the oh three to five traps that each individual needed.

I mean, the guys heading out west there, they weren't decked in buckskins or they were going with what they had on.

They might've come out with a military coat and a pair of leather brogum shoes.

Out of necessity, they often traded those off.

I know there's a quote from a book about Joe Meek there where he said for a handful of beads, a free trapper's wife made him three pairs of moccasins.

And he said he just walked totally different that once I abandoned my shoes from the civilization, I felt like I was in touch with the earth.

We talk about traders and trappers and we think, well, there weren't very many trappers in Kansas because they all went to the mountains.

Well, that was the best place.

But think when you look at a map of how many beaver creeks are in Kansas.

And so there were, it didn't get its name by a beaver walking through once.

There was trapping in Kansas, but the hides, the pelts, they're better in the mountains where it's colder.

There's a continual ongoing debate amongst our American Mountain Man organization there that some of the guys say, well, the mountain men trapped and processed a lot of other furs besides beaver.

But there's direct notes from William Ashley and some of the major fur traders that beaver was the only thing that was worth enough to spend the money to pack out of the mountains.

They were trapping a lot of other things that are non-target animals and muskrat.

And basically east of the Mississippi, a lot of those pelts were traded, but direct quotes there were beaver were the only thing it was worth enough to pack out of the mountains.

And the beaver pelts were also graded too because you had those that weren't too good and then you got to up to the really great ones, which using a French term was a plu meaning plus.

And that was the same thing with the buffalo hides.

You know, the buffalo hides-- the best grade of beaver was called a blanket size, blanket beaver.

So that would have been the largest ones and the best quality.

An early term in North American history, they called it a hairy bank note.

And that was what the economy of the early United States was founded on.

And the canoes were, I mean, you could load a whole lot of hides.

Yeah, you could get roughly about 90 beaver pelts to a pack.

Yeah.

And you were paid by the pound rather than by the pelt like today's market.

Yeah.

And-- Yeah, because most of this weights on the frame-- Yeah, the frame and that was just done to dry them.

And once they were dry, then they were taken off and folded and usually oh, anywhere from 70 to 90 pelts into a bundle.

Most of the time they were packed out two bundles at a time to a riverfront location and then loaded onto the keel boats.

For the transportation to trade goods, it depended on where they were because you get away from the rivers out here.

You didn't have the keel boats or the barges out here.

So those are mostly packed trains.

And then later you're, well, on the Santa Fe Trail, it's the wagons and big wagons.

But yeah, the rivers were big of coming out of the Yellowstone and down in Missouri.

Yeah, that Platte was a main, I mean, it was seasonal.

Yeah.

So this canoe is a birch bark canoe with voyagers in it.

And as you can see, it takes several men to row.

But the fun fact about it is when it's empty and dry, it actually only takes two men to carry.

Some of those boats were made out of hides were probably 60 feet long.

You could carry about a dozen men and almost three tons of trade goods.

We do have three birch bark canoes here in our big hall.

The big one is up here, 36 feet.

As I said, it's light enough to be carried by two people when empty.

It is a reproduction, but it was created by the descendants of the people who would have made them originally.

So today you have quite a collection here.

We have guns and trade goods and all sorts of things.

So we'll talk about, I guess the first thing, this material is placed on what was called a trade blanket.

You said it was a three and a half and you can see three and a half bars of how they were graded.

One of the main trade textile items were wool point blankets.

So they're called point blankets because they have little lines woven into the sides and those delineate the size.

So they start with like a baby blanket, which is a half a point and they go clear up to four points.

When they were shipped over from England, they were taxed per blanket.

So what they would do is they'd ship them as doubles, which we have hanging down here.

And then they'd cut them in two when they arrived here in the US.

We do have the oldest known point blanket in existence, which dates to the Revolutionary War era.

And that's here in our exhibit as well.

I mean, they served everything from a shelter to fashioned into blankets, just daily uses of blankets.

And coats.

Yeah, yeah.

Moccasin liners and horse blankets and a little bit of everything.

Yeah, they were all wool and very well made.

One of the main items in our collection, our textiles collection are these five fabric samples.

After the Lewis and Clark expedition, William Clark was named the Office, the Officer of Indian Affairs.

And he chose these five samples specifically for trade with the Western tribes.

These items were found just stuck in an envelope at an auction.

Luckily people know what they are and we were able to acquire them.

So the beads, they were largely based on the region, but different regions preferred different colors of beads.

Beads did come from Europe.

They are glass beads, unless they're shell beads, which come from different tribes.

Venice, Italy was a huge center for bead production.

And some of those bead makers are still making them.

We're going on 250 years.

Pound beads was the original fur trade term of the small beads.

I mean, there was a wide variety of these bigger beads.

These would have actually been of Spanish origin.

They're called the Nuevo Cadiz bead.

They were some of the first ones that were introduced by the Spanish in South America.

And they've showed up off the coast in Georgia and Alabama and some of the Spanish sites up there, but they'll date back to probably the mid 1600s.

And they're also classified as a compound bead because they're white on the inside.

Yep, just a layered bead.

Yeah, they were considered the first North American Chevron.

Yeah.

On this string, there's just a variety of stuff from chevrons and this particular stripe bead was called the Lewis and Clark bead.

And they were actually some of them taken by the Lewis and Clark party as trade items.

And I've got a single bead on here that we did a five day river trip on the Kansas River.

And the Kansas was a main trade route for a lot of the Eastern tribes there and everything.

And we were on a sandbar on the last day of the trip there.

And I just happened to look down and see a glint of blue, reached down and picked it up and it was a Venetian trade bead out on the sandbar there.

But it probably had been out on the river there 300 years ago.

And so there's very tiny beads that we see in the beadwork today.

They're still being made out of glass.

And I mean, they call those seed beads.

They're really tiny.

What they would do is they'd thread them on a horse hair and then they'd take that horse hair and string it in whatever pattern they're doing and sew it on as they went through and did it that way.

So this bead strip has been in our collection for almost ever it seems.

One day a native woman came in and says, I know that bead strip, my grandma made it.

And she actually had a picture of her grandma with the blanket and the bead strip.

Those were very important as trade.

The knives were great because there were some stone knives that were equal to this, but this was a status symbol of getting the trade stuff and a steel knife.

These are majority of these are actually I Wilson's.

Oh, okay.

Yep.

And that was a English manufacturer, but they were known for their quality and traded over the years by a lot of different fur companies.

And the native Americans, they understood quality very quickly.

Yeah.

And would go for the quality and it was worth it not only as a status symbol, but for protection.

The I Wilson's have been in company, been in business since the late 1700s and their company marks changed quite a bit over the years, but it's usually a diamond and peppercorn was the I Wilson mark there.

And that was, I mean, even if the natives couldn't read, they could recognize that diamond peppercorn mark on it.

And that was a sign of quality.

Axes have a very important part of the native culture as weapons, the status symbols, and as major trade items.

These are probably actually a little bit later than the early fur trade.

They date probably 1860s, 1870s.

The earlier ones were a little bit heavier and they were more actually a weapons grade rather than pieces like these were status symbols.

And just about every old photograph that you'd see, I mean, the chief will be holding one of these things as a status symbol.

But these pipe axes, the reason they're called that is they were also a pipe because they have a hollow stem that this is the bit part that you would smoke.

And this is the pipe part where you'd put your tobacco or a kinnekinac.

The axes were one thing that we had opportunity of owning a Lewis and Clark era Missouri war axe.

And they were actually made originally by the blacksmith with Lewis and Clark there.

They referenced where they disassembled one of their steel stoves and made axes out of it in trade.

And they were able to trade for corn to help them survive through the winter with the Hadotzos and the Mandans.

There's also trade guns too.

Our gun room hosts most of our firearms collection.

So while we do have some that can be traced to specific people, we have Kit Carson, Red Cloud, young man afraid of his horse.

And we do have some that were captured at Wounded Knee, the Cheyenne outbreak.

Most of them are Northwest guns.

These are guns that were made specifically for trade with the Native Americans.

They all have this serpent side plate.

It was a mark of quality.

So Native Americans didn't want it if it didn't have that side plate on it.

Because that particular bracelet was made out of this emblem.

Yeah, just called the serpent side plate.

Yeah.

Yep.

And that was a designation of quality that the natives would see and know that it was a good quality gun.

And most of these were English makers.

And this particular one is the Barnett, which was one of the predominant makers.

And that's what this one is.

But they were very popular Indian items and often take that side plate off and turn it into a decorative item.

And I've seen entire breast plates made with rows of these things, probably 12 to 15 of them, just tied across there.

It had been a major status symbol.

So the guns were manufactured primarily for Indian trade.

A lot of the stuff was, some of the beads were in stuff, some of the knives in particular.

The kettles, which were brass or tin or steel, were there because a lot of people think that all the Indians had pottery.

They did in the early times.

Once the Euro-Americans came in, they were not doing the homemade pottery that we find in the prehistoric sites.

They went with these because they were more durable and they could carry them around and they could take a lot of beatings where the pottery could be very heavy and very fragile.

And another thing about this with the steel, after about 1750, as far as I know, and you can correct me on this, they weren't using the stone arrow points or projectile points.

They were trading for the steel.

And also tin snips and small files were also there.

They had the files, not only were using the files to sharpen things, but there's some of the pipe-axe stems and even some of the guns that are branded by a file because you can see the-- Yeah, there was just the file branding.

You can see the file impressions in there and it was a huge thing for decoration by the natives.

Yeah, and that was prehistoric too, is the crosshatching is what we'd have on a regular file.

And so they would heat those up and brand new stuff too.

I mean, part of our American Mountain Man group there is to actually get out and experience things.

So kind of maintain our future there.

You kind of got to look back at the past and kind of learn from your mistakes.

And I mean, there could have been things done a lot differently as far as the way the native population was addressed.

But I mean, it's just... Our organization that is American Mountain Man, a lot of the National Park Service They call on American Mountain Man for accurate historical portrayals and different events there.

There's a National Fur Trade Symposium.

Well, I volunteer out at Maxwell Wildlife Refuge and they two weeks ago.

We had two days there run approximately 600 middle school kids through for presentations.

And the most important thing is a historical accuracy.

Yeah.

The last thing you want to do is present incorrect facts.

And historical accuracy that, I mean, I learned that from my mother as a history teacher there, that that's the most important.

It's been a very important part of my life there.

Well, and too, I think it's very important that you're doing this because it was a very important time in the history of contacting the native Americans and exploration.

And so it was a very important phase in the history of the nation.

(gentle music)