Hiram Martin Chittenden, Historian

HISTORIANS OF THE American West have long relied upon the writings of Hiram Martin Chittenden. As chronicler of the American fur trade, steamboating on the Missouri River, Yellowstone Park, and Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, Chittenden remains an authority on the transMississippi region. A man of varied careers ranging from soldier to port director, he is best remembered as a historian. There is little in the early life of Hiram Chittenden to furnish clues about his future historical interests. Born in the village of Yorkshire in upper New York state in 1858, Chittenden attended grade and district schools near home and taught one year in a country academy.' His diary for the years, 1878-1879, has entries that perhaps indicate the germ of his interest in history, but this evidence is moot: he read a life of Daniel Webster and devoured his father's copies of Horace Greeley's Tribune.2 It is tempting to believe that his interest in the Far West was stimulated by an unnamed work on Indians, a book which he literally wore out, but there is no evidence to show that this volume shaped his career as a historian

American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History

• The Ghost River Caledonia in the Oregon Negotiation of 1818

  Frederick Merk•The American Historical Review•1950

  Add to list

• Steamboats on the Western Rivers

  Walter Havighurst, Louis C Hunter et al.•The American Historical Review•1950

  Add to list

• Whoop-Up Country

  Merrill G Burlingame, Paul F Sharp•The Mississippi Valley Historical…•1956

  Add to list

• The Fur Trade in Canada

  John A Hawgood, H A Innis•The Economic History Review•1933

  Add to list