| Summary: | One of the most detailed and illuminating primary accounts of the fur trading operations of the North West Company is the daily journal kept by Alexander Henry, one of the company's employees and partner, from 1799 until his untimely death in 1814. Henry's original diary is now lost, but a copy of it survives in the Public Archives of Canada in the form of a handwritten copy purportedly made by one George Coventry in 1824. Elliott Coues edited and published the journal in 1897 under the title, New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest: The Manuscript Journals of Alexander Henry, Fur Trader of the Northwest Company, and of David Thompson, Official Geographer and Explorer of the same Company, 1799-1814 (Coues 1965). The Coventry copy, on which Coues' publication and this transcription are based, is described more fully in the "Discussion" section. The document that follows is a new, literal transcription of a portion of his journal consisting of the entries covering the period from July 7 through August 10, 1806, which describe Henry's journey to and from the villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians near the confluence of the Knife and Missouri rivers in present-day central North Dakota.
|
|---|