Edwin Thompson Denig (March 10, 1812 – September 4, 1858) was an American fur trader and pioneer ethnographer active at Fort Union, in present-day

North Dakota North Dakota () is a U.S. state in the Upper Midwest, named after the Native Americans in the United States, indigenous Dakota people, Dakota Sioux. North Dakota is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba to the north a ...

Fur trader

Denig was the son of a prosperous county doctor, yet he chose to dedicate his adult life to the

fur trade The fur trade is a worldwide industry dealing in the acquisition and sale of animal fur. Since the establishment of a world fur market in the early modern period, furs of boreal, polar and cold temperate mammalian animals have been the mos ...

. In 1833 he entered into the service of the

American Fur Company The American Fur Company (AFC) was founded in 1808, by John Jacob Astor, a German immigrant to the United States. During the 18th century, furs had become a major commodity in Europe, and North America became a major supplier. Several British co ...

as a

clerk A clerk is a white-collar worker who conducts general office tasks, or a worker who performs similar sales-related tasks in a retail environment. The responsibilities of clerical workers commonly include record keeping, filing, staffing service ...

, first at Fort Pierre, and from 1837 at Fort Union. There he rose from bookkeeper to chief clerk, and finally ''Bourgeois'' (superintendent of the post and profit-sharing partner). At Fort Union Denig aided various visiting scholars, including

John James Audubon John James Audubon (born Jean-Jacques Rabin; April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was an American self-trained artist, naturalist, and ornithologist. His combined interests in art and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete pictoria ...

, collected scientific specimens, and also collected diverse specimens for the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

.Hewitt 1930.

Ethnographer

On the initiative of

Father De Smet Pierre-Jean De Smet, SJ ( ; 30 January 1801 – 23 May 1873), also known as Pieter-Jan De Smet, was a Flemish Catholic priest and member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). He is known primarily for his widespread missionary work in the mid-19th ...

, Denig began in 1851 to write descriptions of

Plains Indian Plains Indians or Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies are the Native American tribes and First Nation band governments who have historically lived on the Interior Plains (the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies) of N ...

culture that later was included in De Smets writings. Denig also assembled data for

Henry Schoolcraft Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (March 28, 1793 – December 10, 1864) was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnology, ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native Americans in the United States, Native American cultures, as well as for his 1 ...

, later included in this scholar's writings. A later report by Denig on the Assiniboine was published in 1930 as ''Indian Tribes of the Missouri''. A later manuscript lay dormant in the archives, until it was published in 1961 as ''Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri''.

Personal life

Denig entered into several "country marriages" with Native American women. His first marriage was to Sina Wamniomi (Whirlwind Blanket), a Lakota, with whom he had a son, Robert, and a daughter, Sarah. His second marriage, in 1837, was with Hai-kees-kak-wee-yah (Deer Little Woman), an Assiniboine, with whom he had one son, Alexander, and two daughters, Ida and Adeline. The first wife stayed at Fort Pierre, but the son was with his father and the second wife at Fort Union. Denig also married the second wife's younger sister in a polygamous union, that eventually ended when the younger sister moved away. The marriage with the second wife was formalized in 1855 through a

Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

ceremony in

St. Louis St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...

. In 1856 he moved with her and their three children to

Selkirk Settlement The Red River Colony (or Selkirk Settlement), also known as Assiniboia, Assinboia, was a colonization project set up in 1811 by Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, on of land in British North America. This land was granted to Douglas by the Hud ...

, where the children were placed in Catholic schools. Denig was here active as an independent fur trader, but died of appendicitis in 1858.

References

Citations

Cited literature

* Barbour, Barton H. (2001). ''Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade.'' Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. * Ewers, John C. (1961). "Editor's Introduction", in: Edwin Thompson Denig, ''Five Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Hewitt, J. N. B. (1930). "Biographical Sketch", in: Edwin Thompson Denig, ''Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri''. Forty-sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1928-1929. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Denig, Edwin Thompson 1812 births 1858 deaths People from Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania American fur traders Pre-statehood history of North Dakota Writers from Pennsylvania American Fur Company people Businesspeople from Pennsylvania 19th-century American businesspeople 19th-century American male writers 19th-century American non-fiction writers American male non-fiction writers Deaths from appendicitis