Dissertation
The American Frontier and the Scottish Fur Trade in the Pacific Northwest
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2019
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/17883
Abstract
The French and Indian War opened up the fur trade for Scots. They developed their own “model” of country marriage that evolved into a horizontal “clan” system stretching across the continent. Scots “married-in” to Native communities and encouraged other employees, including the French Canadians and Hawaiian kanaka laborers and their own Scots-Indian sons to do likewise. They married their daughters to newcomers, thereby bringing them into the network as well. This pattern can be identified by researching fur trade genealogies. Over time dowries replaced bride prices and marriage became a formal affair, written contract, before a justice of the peace or in a church rather than an oral agreement.
European fathers began to employ ideological institutions like schools and church which taught their daughter to act according to social standards such as the “Cult of Domesticity.” Native women had had a long history of adapting European trade goods into Native fashion and altering their traditional clothing styles to accommodate new lifeways, but now the daughters were expected to dress according to their European social status. The daughters of the country were now seen as assimilated and to have “married-out” of their Indian cultures and into the Euro American culture. In order to move Indian lands into the trade network and thereby the public sphere these mixed-blood women were considered assimilated and these European-Indian marriages were deemed legal and binding
Americans traveled across the North American continent expecting to find an empty wilderness in which to plant their own version of the Puritans “city on the hill.” They took with them ideologies about the frontier, wilderness, and Indians, especially the “Indian Princess.” Captivity narratives had been used by the Puritans to establish social conformity and their morality code continued to permeate American lives 200 years later as thousands left the United States for the Pacific Northwest. Rather than a barren wilderness they found an already established agricultural community operated by the London based Hudson’s Bay Company. This “imagined community” had schools, churches, a cemetery, a lumber mill, produced grain and had a mill, as well as orchards, gardens, and livestock.
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Details
- Title
- The American Frontier and the Scottish Fur Trade in the Pacific Northwest
- Creators
- Alys Rachel Webber
- Contributors
- Rory J Ong (Advisor)Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo (Committee Member)Orlan Svingen (Committee Member)Rich King (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- School of Languages, Cultures, and Race
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 147
- Identifiers
- 99900581415001842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation