Astor Expedition - Further Reading

Further Reading

• Many accounts of the Pacific Fur Company’s Overland Expedition have been written. Two British naturalists, John Bradbury and Thomas Nuttall, accompanied the expedition as far as the Arikara and Mandan Villages in present-day South Dakota and North Dakota. Nuttall published an account of his observations in the book The Genera of North American Plants in 1818 as well as Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada in 1832. Bradbury published an excellent account of this leg of the journey up the Missouri in his book Travels in the Interior of America in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811.

• Naturalist Henry Marie Brackenridge accompanied the Missouri Fur Company party, under Manuel Lisa, up the Missouri River at the same time. Brackenridge also wrote an account, Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River in 1811, which was published in 1814.

• Wilson Price Hunt’s journal from the Missouri River to Fort Astoria was published in French in 1820, but not translated and published in English until 1935. Washington Irving’s Astoria, was published in 1836 (and for a synopsis of the accuracy of Irving’s work, see the Edgeley W. Todd edition). And although they arrived at Fort Astoria by sea and so did not accompany the overland party, clerks Gabriel Franchere, Alexander Ross and Ross Cox each published additional memoirs of the Pacific Fur Company, including accounts of the overland expedition.