A Mountain Man's Year, 1837: Beaver at $4 a Pound, Sugar at $2 a Pint

Green River, July 1837: a mountain man is paid four or five dollars a pound for his beaver, and on the same rendezvous meadow the fur company sells him sugar at two dollars a pint and alcohol at four. A trapper named Osborne Russell wrote the prices down and called it 2,000 per cent. We follow his Journal of a Trapper through the next twelve months, fall hunt, winter camp, spring hunt and back to the rendezvous, with the American Fur Company's own St. Louis invoice for that summer's supply train beside it: mountain man wages, rendezvous prices 1825 to 1837, and who was in debt to whom. CHAPTERS 00:00 A pound of beaver, a pint of sugar 01:31 Summer: the carts from St. Louis and "2,000 per cent" 13:00 Fall hunt: four men and a marked tree 18:24 Winter: on foot to the fort, winter camp, who owed whom 29:52 Spring: every man for his own stream 32:16 Summer again: a note on the storehouse wall Sources: Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper; or, Nine Years in the Rocky Mountains, 1834–1843 (Boise, 1921) — https://archive.org/details/journalof... American Fur Company, invoice for the Rocky Mountain Outfit, 1837 (Missouri Historical Society), modern transcription — http://www.mtmen.org/mtman/html/rmo18... The Correspondence and Journals of Captain Nathaniel J. Wyeth, 1831–6 (Eugene, 1899) — https://archive.org/details/correspon... W. A. Ferris, Life in the Rocky Mountains (1842–44) — http://www.mtmen.org/mtman/html/ferri... John K. Townsend, Narrative of a Journey across the Rocky Mountains (1839), in Early Western Travels XXI — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45238 Washington Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837) — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1372 Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard (1839) — http://www.mtmen.org/mtman/html/leoni... Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky Mountains (1840) — https://archive.org/details/journalan... Charles Larpenteur, Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri (1898) — https://archive.org/details/fortyyear... Frances Fuller Victor, The River of the West (1870) — https://archive.org/details/riverofwe... H. M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West (1902), vol. I — https://archive.org/details/americanf... Ashley's 1825 accounts, the Ashley agreement of 1826, Daniel Potts's letters and Robert Campbell's 1832 accounts, modern transcriptions — http://www.mtmen.org/mtman/html/ashli... Russell's journal gives "$4 or $5 per pound" for beaver; the title uses the lower figure. The St. Louis costs come from a modern transcription of the 1837 invoice; we have not seen the manuscript. Every "times as much" is our own arithmetic, and we did not compare sugar or coffee, because the meadow price is by the pint and the invoice price by the pound. We found no St. Louis market price for beaver in a paper of the time. Russell's journal was printed by his family in 1914; how much was written in camp is not known. Everything said here about the Shoshone, Crow, Nez Perce, Salish, Bannock, Sioux and Blackfeet comes from trappers, traders and a missionary; we opened no account from those nations. Illustrations are AI-generated recreations; narration uses a synthetic voice. #MountainMen #FurTrade #OldWest