The figures who dominated this narrative were men: Lewis and Clark, John Jacob Astor, Wilson Price Hunt, the various trappers and traders and military officers who moved through the country in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Indigenous people appeared in this narrative as obstacles, as guides, as trade partners, or as exotic background.

Indigenous women appeared even less prominently, typically as the partners of European men, as “native wives” whose contributions were acknowledged if at all as supplementary to the primary story being told.

This is not a neutral historical accident.

It reflects specific choices made by specific people about what constituted the important story of the era.

Those choices were informed by assumptions about gender, about race, about what kinds of lives and contributions were worth detailed historical documentation.