Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri: Edited with Notes and Biographical SketchDenig, Edwin Thompson
History
Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri: Edited with Notes and Biographical Sketch
Denig, Edwin Thompson
Assiniboine Indians; Indians of North America -- Missouri River Valley
Dr. F. V. Hayden made extensive use of this report in preparation of
his “Contributions to the Ethnography and Philology of the Indian
Tribes of the Missouri Valley,” Philadelphia, C. Sherman & Son, 1862.
But he did not give Mr. Denig proper credit for using verbatim numbers
of pages of the manuscript without any indication that he was copying a
manuscript work from another writer whose position and long experience
among them made him an authority on the tribes in question. This piece
of plagiarism was not concealed by the bald statement of Doctor Hayden
that he was “especially indebted to Mr. Alexander Culbertson, the
well-known agent of the American Fur Co., who has spent 30 years of his
life among the wild tribes of the Northwest and speaks several of their
languages with great ease. To Mr. Andrew Dawson, superintendent of Fort
Benton; Mr. Charles E. Galpin, of Fort Pierre; and E. T. Denig, of Fort
Union, I am under great obligations for assistance freely granted at
all times.”
Mr. Edwin Thompson Denig, the author of this manuscript report, was the
son of Dr. George Denig and was born March 10, 1812, in McConnellstown,
Huntingdon County, Pa., and died in 1862 or 1863 in Manitoba, probably
in the town of Pilot Mound, in the vicinity of which his daughters
live, or did live in 1910. His legally married wife was the daughter of
an Assiniboin chief, by whom he had two daughters, Sara, who was born
August 10, 1844, and Ida, who was born August 22, 1854, and one son,
Alexander, who was born May 17, 1852, and who was killed by lightning
in 1904.
To his early associates Mr. Denig was a myth, more or less, having
gone West as a young man and having died there. He lost caste with his
family because of his marriage with the Assiniboin woman.
Mr. Denig entered the fur trade in 1833 and became very influential
among the tribes of the upper Missouri River. He was for a time a
Government scout; then a bookkeeper for the American Fur Co. Earlier he
had gone to St. Louis and became connected with the Chouteaus and the
American Fur Co. Before he was 30 years of age he was living among the
Indians as the representative of these two companies in that vast and
almost unknown region between the headwaters of the Mississippi and the
Missouri Rivers inhabited by tribes of the Sioux.
Mr. Denig became a bookkeeper for the American Fur Co. at Fort Union,
situated near the mouth of the Yellowstone River, of the offices of
which for a time, about 1843, he was superintendent. Because of his
thorough and comprehensive knowledge of the Indians of his adopted
tribe, their language, customs, and tribal relations, he was consulted
by most of the noted Indian investigators of that period—Schoolcraft,
Hayden, and others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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