Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 edition. Excerpt: ... R. IRVTNG'S acquaintance at Montreal, many years since, with some of the principal partners of the great Northwest Fur Company, was the means of interesting him deeply in the varied concerns of trappers, hunters, and Indians, and in all the adventurous details connected with the commerce in peltries. Not long after his return from his late tour to the prairies, he held a conversation with his friend, Mr. John Jacob Astor, of New York, in relation to an enterprise set on foot and conducted by that gentleman, about the year 1812, --an enterprise having for its object a participation, on the most extensive scale, in the fur trade carried on with the Indians in all the western and northwestern regions of North America. Finding Mr. Irving fully alive to the exciting interest of this subject, Mr. Astor was induced to express a regret that the true nature and extent of the enterprise, together with its great national character and importance, had never been generally comprehended; and a wish that Mr. Irving would undertake to give an account of it. To this he consented. All the papers relative to the matter were submitted to his inspection; and the volumes now before us (two wellsized octavos) are the result. The work has been accomplished in a masterly manner, the modesty of the title affording no indication of the fulness, comprehensiveness, and beauty with which a long and entangled series of detail, collected necessarily from a mass of vague and imperfect data, has been wrought into completeness and unity. 1 Astoria 1 or. Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains. By Washington Irving. From the Southern Literary Messenger (or 18--. Supposing our readers acquainted with the main features of the original fur trade in America, we..