Contested Empire: Peter Skene Ogden and the Snake River Expeditions

Contested Empire: Peter Skene Ogden and the Snake River Expeditions. By John Phillip Reid. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. pp. xiii, 258. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $29.95.)In late May 1825, Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) clerk Peter Skene Ogden, leading his first Snake country fur-trapping expedition, was encamped on the Weber River in northeastern Utah when he encountered a group of twenty-five trappers working on contract for American fur traders based in St. Louis. Given the intense competition between the British and American trapping parties and the contested territorial claims over the Oregon country, Ogden soon found himself in a precarious situation. Twenty-three of his own free trappers-French Canadians, Metis, and Iroquois-chose to desert to the American party, taking several thousand beaver pelts with them. Ogden also became embroiled in a tense confrontation with John Gardner, unofficial leader of the American party. In the end, Ogden chose to retreat with his depleted expedition rather than risk a violent clash with the Americans.Ogden's encounter with the American trapping party and the mass desertion of freemen from his Snake county party form the cornerstone of John Philip Reid's Contested Empire. In contrast to his previous book, Patterns of Vengeance: Cross-Cultural Homicide in the North American Fur Trade (1999), a large-scale project on the North American fur trade, Contested Empire is a tighter, more focused study. As a legal scholar, Reid again explores questions of law, here probing the relations between British and American fur-trapping parties in a region that was jointly claimed by the United States and Great Britain, but in which no formal legal institutions existed to police those relations. Although the Far West has often been portrayed as lacking law and order, Reid asks why, in fact, violence did not occur between British and American fur-trapping parties in the Snake River Country during the 1820s.Reid opens his investigation with a brief overview of the historical literature on the fur trade, placing his own emphasis on legal questions within this framework and making a convincing argument that the limited attention given to legal matters reveals an important weakness in the field. Reid grounds his analysis in a close reading of the primary sources and asks fresh questions that will stimulate future research about the fur trade in particular and about frontier zones more generally. By arguing that the Snake country was not a lawless region, but a place where westerners attempted to solve real legal problems, Reid demonstrates how legal behaviorism, or lawfulness, operated in the transboundary Oregon country.The Anglo-Canadians, French-Canadians, Metis, French-speaking Native Americans (mainly Iroquois), French-Americans, and Anglo-Americans involved in the Far Western fur trade shared an internalized knowledge of legal principles, especially property rights, that allowed them to avoid violence-though not necessarily misunderstandings-among themselves. The historic dominance of English-speaking peoples in North America is central to Reid's argument about a shared respect for property rights among the trappers. Unfortunately, Reid overlooks the legal tradition in French North America after the Conquest of 1763, especially how this tradition may-or may not-have influenced the perceptions of the francophone French-Canadians, Metis, and Indians. …

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