AUGUST 9:

August 9, 1814: The Treaty of Fort Jackson (7 stat.120) officially ends the Creek War. The Creeks, including those who fought with Andrew Jackson, are forced to cede 22,000,000 acres, almost half their lands, to the United States. Timpoochee Barnard, one of the Yuchi Indian allies of the Americans, is one of the signatories to the treaty of Fort Jackson. Fort Jackson, formerly Fort Toulouse, is in modern Wetumpka, Alabama.

1757 Fort William Henry New York Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm 1712-1759 leads 6,200 troops and 1,800 Indians in capture of Fort William Henry; takes 2,200 British prisoners; stops murder of prisoners by Native allies.

1836 Ontario Chippewas cede 600,000 hectares in Bruce, Grey, Huron, and Wellington Counties to the Crown; 1,500,000 acres

August 9, 1833:  Representatives of the American Fur Company arrive at Fort McKenzie on the Missouri River.  This will be the start of the first continuous trader operations among the Blackfeet.  Among those present today are Iron Shirt (Blood), Bear Chief (Piegan) and Prince Maximilian of Wied-Newied.

August 9, 1911:  Ishi ("the last of his tribe") comes into Oroville, California.
 
 

BACKGROUND:
 

During their journey from St. Louis to the upper Missouri, Maximilian and Bodmer witnessed a thriving fur trade, then the primary contact between Euro-American and Native American cultures, flourishing at the trading posts of Fort Pierre, Fort Clark, Fort Union, and Fort McKenzie. The American Fur Company's forts were centers for economic and cultural exchange between the Native Americans of the Plains and the fur-trading American settlers. The traders came to the area in search of pelts and hides, and sought the Indians as trading partners because of their skills as hunters and suppliers of fur. In the summer and winter, smaller bands of the nomadic Indians traveled across the Plains hunting buffalo. In the spring and fall these bands came together to trade at the Company's forts. The winter hunt for buffalo brought the heavy hides of the buffalo cow which could be made into warm winter robes; and summer hunts brought a major supply of meat and hides suitable for tanning.

As the market for fur increased, however, the number of buffalo and fur-bearing animals whose hides were a valuable trade commodity, decreased. This reduction in the Indian's resource-base, coupled with growing westward U. S. expansion, led to major shifts in Native American culture.

Disease also brought drastic changes to the peoples along the Missouri. Just three years after Maximilian and Bodmer visited Fort Clark, an epidemic of smallpox reached the Mandan villages near the fort by way of the trader's steamboat, nearly decimating that tribe. Four Bears, a Mandan chief and friend to Maximilian and Bodmer, said after his contraction of smallpox: "Four Bears never saw a white man hungry, but what he gave him to eat...and how have they repaid it!...I do not fear death...but to die with my face rotten, that even the wolves will shrink...at seeing me and say to themselves, that is Four Bears, the friend of the whites."

From:   http://www.joslyn.org/teach/packets/bodmer1/themes.html