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The Fine Art Of Trading At Historic Fort Benton, c.1848

Flickr user, BigRedSky

It's 1848 and you're heading 2,200 miles up the Missouri River, spending two months literally pulling the keel boat upstream. When you arrive at the American Fur Company trading post of Fort Benton, you're in for a surprise. It's a barter post rather than a military fort, where Blackfeet and white traders exchange goods, not hostilities. In fact, many of these traders are related through marriage. There's usually an exchange of gifts before trading begins in earnest.  For the rest of the twenty years preceding the discovery of gold in the early 1860s, relationships between whites and Indians at Fort Benton will continue to be characterized by mutual respect.

(Broadcast: "Home Ground Radio," 11/30/14. Listen weekly on the radio, Sundays at  11:10 a.m., or via podcast.)

Beth Anne Austein has been spinning tunes on the air (The Folk Show, Dancing With Tradition, Freeforms), as well as recording, editing and mixing audio for Montana Public Radio and Montana PBS, since the Clinton Administration. She’s jockeyed faders or "fixed it in post” for The Plant Detective; Listeners Bookstall; Fieldnotes; Musicians Spotlight; The Write Question; Storycorps; Selected Shorts; Bill Raoul’s music series; orchestral and chamber concerts; lecture series; news interviews; and outside producers’ programs about topics ranging from philosophy to ticks.
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