A sprawling account of the Trans-Mississippi West between the consummation of the Louisiana Purchase and the outbreak of the American Civil War, the author uses the fur trade (at least initially) as a lens to illustrate how the West could have developed in a more organic fashion, without the near annihilation of the Indian nations in the face of the massive waves of settler colonialism; none of these frontier merchants achieved much without a willingness to take the cultural norms of the First Nations seriously. I'm not quite as impressed with this work as I thought I might be in the sense that it could have used more focus. Still, the author does do the popular historiography of the West a service by reminding the reader of the violence and chaos and injustice of it all. ( )