Ross Cox 1793-1853
Ross Cox (1793–1853) was an Irish-born fur trader, explorer, and author who traveled to North America in his youth to seek adventure. He worked as a clerk for John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company beginning in 1811, and later joined the North West Company in 1813 after the War of 1812 forced the Pacific Fur Company to liquidate. After spending six years trading and traveling extensively throughout the Pacific Northwest, he returned to Ireland in 1817, where he worked as a police clerk and a newspaper correspondent. Cox is best remembered today for his 1831 memoir, Adventures on the Columbia River, which serves as a highly valuable historical record of the early North American fur trade and the Indigenous peoples of the region.
Biographical Overview
- Lived from 1793 to 1853
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Ross Cox was a fur trader for the Pacific Fur Company. In 1811 he sailed form New York, around the Horn, to Hawaii, and on to the Columbia River, exploring inland to Montana along the Clark Fork and Flathead Rivers. For six years he lived on the frontier--and beyond--in a violent world of white and red men, bears and wolves, frostbite, and starvation. He wasn't a hero, but he was a survivor, and a sharp observer who wrote one of the best firsthand accounts of the fur trapper's life.
340 pages
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Last updated: 2026-09-10