A Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri: The Journal and Description of Jean-Baptiste Truteau, 1794–1796 ed. by Raymond J. DeMallie, Douglas R. Parks, and Robert Vézina
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: A Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri: The Journal and Description of Jean-Baptiste Truteau, 1794–1796 ed. by Raymond J. DeMallie, Douglas R. Parks, and Robert Vézina Barton H. Barbour A Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri: The Journal and Description of Jean-Baptiste Truteau, 1794–1796. Edited by Raymond J. DeMallie, Douglas R. Parks, and Robert Vézina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. vi + 674 pp. Illustrations, figures, maps, tables, bibliography, notes, index. $100.00 cloth. Some elements of Jean-Baptiste Truteau's (1748–1827) journal narratives and reports have been published, but this is the first comprehensive critical edition of documents related to Truteau's two-year sojourn among Indian nations of the Upper Missouri a decade before Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery arrived at the Mandan villages. Superbly translated, edited, indexed, and annotated, the book eclipses previous efforts. Side-byside French and English transcriptions offer easy access to Truteau's narrative, and an opportunity for readers to develop a feel for the early eighteenth-century French that fur traders spoke in the pays d'en haut, the "upriver country." Québécois historian and linguist Robert Vézina provides an enlightening, engaging linguistic and literary analysis of Truteau's vernacular French. An experienced French-Canadian voyageur, Truteau served Spain's St. Louis–based "Company of the Upper Missouri." After France ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1763, Spanish and French residents struggled to develop the fur trade, with generally meager results. Almost no Americans had yet seen the Upper Missouri, but Montréal-based North West Company traders operated a few posts in the region, agitating Spanish fears of English meddlers. Truteau's expedition, sometimes dismissed as a "failure," actually stands out as Spain's last best effort to achieve fur trade success before the US secured the territory in 1803. Highly educated and steeped in exploration narratives (and occasionally "lifting" sections from predecessors' works), Truteau carried a long list of instructions from his employers. A witty and keenly observant writer, he recorded a welter of details on geography, fur resources, trade prospects, Native ethnography, tribal and intertribal politics, warfare, cosmology, and the like. Truteau was a devout Catholic, but like other traders he embraced an old French proverb, Avec les loups il faut hurler ("Among wolves one must howl"). Filtering out French cultural norms and biases that lacked any utility in the "Indian Country" enabled Truteau to make clear-minded observations and produce remarkably sound ethnographic data. During two challenging years punctuated with bad luck, potentially deadly confrontations, undependable lodgings, few companions, a paucity of substandard trade goods, and no support, reinforcements, or supplies from St. Louis, Truteau dutifully served his employers and provided future historians a wealth of information. In sum, this superb book reflects the talents of top-flight scholars who gave Truteau's significant narrative the attention it merits. An impressive example of "best practices" in fur trade scholarship, it makes compelling reading and is highly recommended. [End Page 438] Barton H. Barbour Department of History Boise State University Copyright © 2018 The Center for Great Plains Studies and The University of Nebraska Press
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".