Posts Tagged ‘fur trade’
Road Trip Through History: Old Fort Madison
And now, back to the Great River Road after a brief detour to South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century: We got to Old Fort Madison, outside what I suppose would be called new Fort Madison Iowa, shortly before the site closed. We had driven past the town where we planned to…
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Rock Island Arsenal, Part 1: Colonel Davenport’s House, and a Couple of Long Digressions
Visiting “Colonel” George Davenport’s house on the Rock Island Arsenal* turned out to be more interesting than I expected, in part because of our knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide. And also because it turned out that “Colonel” Davenport was right at the center of things in the history of the the region. Something I also hadn’t…
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Russia, Siberia, and the Fur Trade
And speaking of the fur trade, as I believe we were, the Russian fur trade did not begin in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest of North America. At the same time that French and British (and to a lesser extent, Dutch, and Swedish) fur traders were exploring the virgin forests of North America in the…
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