"Do law and legal procedures exist only so long as there is an official authority to enforce them? Or do we have an unspoken sense of law and ethics?" "To answer these questions, John Phillip Reid's Contested Empire explores the implicit notions of law shared by American and British fur traders in the Snake River country of Idaho and surrounding areas in the early nineteenth century. Both the United States and Great Britain had claimed this region, and passions were intense. Focusing mainly on Canadian explorer and trader Peter Skene Ogden, Reid finds that both sides largely avoided violence and other difficulties because they held the same definitions of property, contract, conversion, and possession." "In 1824, the Hudson's Bay Company directed Ogden to decimate the fur-bearing animal population of the Snake River country, thus making the region a "fur desert." With this mandate, Great Britain hoped to neutralize any interest American furtrappers could have in the area. Such a mandate set British and American fur men on a collision course, but Ogden and his American counter-parts implicity followed a kind of law and procedure and observed a mutual sense of property and rights even as the two sides vied for control of the fur trade." "Failing to take legal culture into consideration, some previous accounts have depicted these conflicts as mere episodes of lawless frontier violence. Reid expands our understanding of the West by considering the unspoken sense of law that existed, despite the lack of any formalized authorities, in what has otherwise been considered a "lawless" time."--Jacket

xiii, 258 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Peter Skene Ogden’s Snake Country journals, 1824-25 and 1825-26 chronicles the aggressive mercantile colonization and ruthless terrestrial subjugation of a violently fractured, immense inland wilderness spanning from the towering alpine barricades of the northern Rockies to the unforgiving, sun-baked expanse of the Great Basin. The narrative maps how the severe environmental realities of this untamed frontier—defined by impassable granite peaks, treacherous, deep-canyon hydrological arteries, and sprawling, arid high-desert steppes—initially dictated a brutal struggle for survival, forcing early Hudson's Bay Company trapping brigades to endure crippling winter extremes and severe resource deprivation. By detailing the grueling deployment of these massive, highly organized overland expeditions to execute a deliberate "scorched-earth" policy of systematic faunal extraction, the text illustrates how the geopolitical control of the territory was strictly dictated by the urgent imperial necessity to artificially strip the landscape of its raw ecological wealth and engineer a barren, geographic buffer zone against advancing American expansion. Ultimately, the account demonstrates that methodically mapping these hostile geographic extremes and violently imposing a monopolistic, proto-industrial harvesting grid to conquer the profound continental detachment of the Snake River plain were the absolute prerequisites for binding the untamed inland empire to the global commercial markets of the British maritime seaboard.

lxxix, 283 pages ; 25 cm.