Chinook Trade Jargon

Indian Sign Language

Hudson's Bay Company

Ac ko mok ki's Map, 1801

Vancouver's Voyage

Crossing the Rockies

Trade Negotiations

Trade Negotiations

This diagram, recorded by a traveler a generation after the Lewis and Clark expedition, gives us a glimpse of how traders in the Indian country negotiated exchange rates for furs and European trade goods.

Here the traveler, German naturalist Prince Maximilian of Wied, reports that a Mandan hunter offered to exchange a musket and thirty beaver pelts for the hides of a white buffalo, a weasel, and an otter.

The diagram, which was used as part of their negotiations, appeared in Maximilian’s report of his travels along the upper Missouri River in 1833–1834.

Maximilian Alexander Philipp, Prince of Wied-Neuwied. Travels to the Interior of North America, 1843.