FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Kathy Davison (701) 328-4725 or Bonnie Johnson (701) 328-2093
October 21, 2011
BISMARCK – The latest edition of North Dakota History focuses on one of the most important fur traders on the Northern Plains: James Kipp. A prominent member of two 19th Century fur trading companies, Kipp’s story has not been fully explored until this issue of North Dakota History, written by the eminent scholar W. Raymond Wood, who has spent his professional life studying the archaeology and history of the central and northern Plains. A brief accompanying article, “From the Sites: Fort Clark State Historic Site” details the Mandan, and later Arikara, village Mih-tutta-hang-kusch and neighboring trading posts Fort Clark and Primeau’s Post.
North Dakota History is the quarterly journal published since 1926 by the state’s history agency, the State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND).
Kipp’s trading career on the Missouri River spans almost the entire history of the trade – from 1822 to 1859. Wood’s article, “James Kipp: Upper Missouri Fur Trader and Missouri River Farmer,” discusses the long life of the Canadian-born carpenter, trader, and businessman. He is credited with designing or building most of the American Fur Company’s trading posts, including Fort Clark, Fort Union, and Fort Berthold in today’s North Dakota. His assistance to artists and scientists like George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, Prince Maximilian, and others was invaluable and helped to create one of the most complete contemporary records of the encounter of Indian nations with the advancing Euro-American culture.
James Kipp was born into a family of Loyalists who, after the Revolutionary War, fled New York for Nova Scotia, and then Quebec. Before he was 20, Kipp was employed by the North West Company on the Red River just south of the Canadian border. When the War of 1812 began, he returned to Canada, became a carpenter, and married; after his wife’s death in 1821, Kipp left his daughters with his mother and headed back west to resume his career as a fur trader, soon joining the Columbia Fur Company on the Missouri River.
One of Kipp’s first assignments was to revive the trade with the Mandans, and by the spring of 1823, Kipp was constructing a post on the Missouri River near the mouth of the Knife River, just downstream from the Mandan village of Mih-tutta-hang-kusch. That first fort was soon replaced with another fort closer to the village. In 1827, after the Columbia Fur Company merged with the American Fur Company, Kipp joined the new organization, and within a few years, built a third post, known as Fort Clark, beside the village. Married to a Mandan woman and fluent in the Mandan language, Kipp’s knowledge of Mandan customs and language was invaluable to the artist George Catlin, who spent a considerable amount of time at Fort Clark as Kipp’s guest in 1832. Kipp also was instrumental in Catlin’s being allowed to view the four-day Mandan Okipa and other ceremonies. When Prince Maximilian and the artist Karl Bodmer arrived the next year, they also were housed with Kipp, his wife, and their two-year-old son. Without Kipp’s assistance Maximilian would not have been able to prepare his detailed reports of the life of the Mandan people. Kipp probably met every significant historical figure that traveled on the Missouri during the course of his long career. Besides Maximilian, Bodmer, Catlin, and Schoolcraft, he also knew French scientist Joseph Nicollet, Lieutenant John C. Fremont, Father Pierre-Jean de Smet, and almost everyone involved in one way or another with the fur trade in the West. Many relatives, including three nephews, were also involved in the trade.
In 1839, at age 51, Kipp also entered a downstream marriage, to 25-year-old Mary Bloodgood in Missouri. A few years later he bought a farm north of Kansas City, near the current site of the Kansas City International Airport, and Mary stayed home to take care of the farm while Kipp was on the Upper Missouri. In the fall, Kipp usually led a pack train some 2,000 miles up the river, carrying European and American goods to trade with the Native people of the Upper Missouri. In the spring he would lead trips down the Missouri River to St. Louis with a fleet of keelboats or Mackinaws loaded with furs. He continued this pattern well into his 60s.
In the 1840s, when the Hidatsa and Mandan people, hard-hit by a series of smallpox and other epidemics, settled in the new village of Like-a-Fishhook, Kipp and Frances Chardon followed, building the new post of Fort Berthold, where Kipp acted as bourgeois, or director, for most of his remaining years on the Upper Missouri. It was here that Kipp married another Mandan woman, Sak-we-ah-ki (Earth Woman), the daughter of Mato-Tope (Four Bears) and possibly of his favorite wife, Mink. Their only known child, Joseph Kipp, was born in 1849.
His last few years in the fur trade Kipp spent as the bourgeois at Fort Union. He retired to his farm in Missouri at the age of 71 in 1859, where the next year’s federal census records showed James and Mary Kipp, as well as Kipp’s son by his first Mandan wife, Samuel, Samuel’s wife, Mariah, and their two children living on the farm. Kipp continued to make regular visits up the Missouri River to Earth Woman, Joseph, and his old friends on the Upper Missouri River. Finally, age caught up with the old trader, and in 1878, when he could no longer travel, he ended a letter to Joseph, “Give my love to your mother and all the family. I remain affectionately, Father.” James Kipp died July 2, 1880, at the age of 92.
W. Raymond Wood is professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has spent his professional life studying the archaeology and history of the central and northern Plains. Dr. Wood is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and articles, including several for North Dakota History. His latest book, Fort Clark and its Indian Neighbors: A Trading Post on the Upper Missouri, was published this October by the University of Oklahoma Press. Also this year A White-Bearded Plainsman: The Memoirs of Archaeologist W. Raymond Wood was released, and in 2008 the State Historical Society of North Dakota published Wood’s Twilight of the Upper Missouri River Fur Trade: The Journals of Henry A. Boller.
A companion piece in the latest North Dakota History, “From the Sites: Fort Clark State Historic Site,” examines the one of the most important archaeological sites on the northern Plains, Fort Clark. James Kipp built three trading posts there, and spent much of his career with the Mandan and Arikara at the site, which is known today for its significant documentation, association with the devastating 1837 smallpox epidemic, and the multiple cultures who lived and worked there. The article was written by SHSND Assistant Editor Bonnie T. Johnson.
The Mandan village, Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, was founded in 1822 and Kipp’s trading posts near the village soon followed. Steamboats began arriving at Fort Clark in 1832, delivering trade goods to the fort and returning to St. Louis with beaver pelts and bison robes. In 1837 a steamboat also brought smallpox, documented by Fort Clark trader Francis A. Chardon in a journal he kept at the fort. By the spring of 1837 as many as 90 percent of the residents of Mih-tutta-hang-kusch were dead of smallpox, and the surviving villagers moved further upstream. The Arikaras, who had been living just downriver from Fort Clark, settled into the largely empty village, and Fort Clark and its competitor, Primeau’s Post, continued in operation until the early 1860s, when the villagers moved to Like-a-Fishhook Village and the traders to Fort Berthold.
The area including Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, Fort Clark, and Primeau’s Post became Fort Clark Trading Post State Historic Site in 1936. Archaeologists, including W. Raymond Wood, have excavated the site since the 1960s. Combined with the extensive 30-year documentary record of visitors to Fort Clark, the recent studies help us understand the complicated history of Fort Clark and Mih-tutta-hang-kusch, and the interactions between Native, European, and Euro-American people living there. Today, interpretive trails and signs explain the era of the two competing fur trading posts as well as two different American Indian cultures, all sharing the same site in a very short span of time. The archaeological site is located between Washburn and Stanton, and is open May 16 through September 15.
An excellent teaching tool for history and other related classes, North Dakota History is available for $14.95 plus tax at local bookstores and newsstands, the North Dakota Heritage Center Museum Store in Bismarck, or by mail order. To order, write the State Historical Society of North Dakota, 612 East Boulevard Avenue, Bismarck, ND 58505, call (701) 328-2666, or e-mail histsoc@nd.gov. Add $2 to cover shipping for the first copy and 50 cents for each additional copy. For more information, contact the State Historical Society’s website at www.history.nd.gov.
Subscriptions to North Dakota History are offered as a benefit of membership in the SHSND Foundation, a private, non-profit organization which supports programs and activities of the State Historical Society. For information or to join, write to the Foundation at P.O. Box 1976, Bismarck, ND 58502, call (701) 222-1966, e-mail hstlfdn@btinet.net, or visit the Society’s website.
- 30 -
Address:
612 East Boulevard Ave.
Bismarck, North Dakota 58505
Get Directions
Hours:
Exhibit galleries and Museum Store: 8am - 5pm M-F; Sat. & Sun. 10am - 5pm.
State Archives: 8am - 4:30pm., M-F, except legal holidays, and 2nd Sat. of each month, 10am - 4:30 pm.
State Historical Society offices: 8am - 5pm M-F, except legal holidays.
Contact Us:
phone: (701) 328-2666
fax: (701) 328-3710
email: histsoc@nd.gov
