Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade

SHEPARD KRECH III is a professor of anthropology and director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University. He is a past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory and has been a fellow and trustee of the National Humanities Center. His many books include The Ecological Indian and Encyclopedia of World Environmental History.

The essayists in the present book give no support whatever to Martin's condescending revival of the irrational savage, and it should be said plainly that this book stands head and shoulders above Martin's Keepers in reliable, documented information, in logic, and in candor. These are carefully considered inquiries far removed from polemics. Much more than Martin's work, they deserve historians' attention as models of how anthropologists can use empirical methods and data in approaching issues of historical as well as ethnological importance.