Jim Hardee – Bartolomé Baca and the Trappers

Description

Jim Hardee has published numerous articles and books on the Rocky Mountain fur trade, most recently Hope Maintains Her Throne: The Western Expeditions of Nathaniel J. Wyeth, 1834-36. For ten years, he served as editor of the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Journal, published by the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, Wyoming. He continues to serve on that museum’s Editorial Board and Historical Advisory Board.

Hardee has been a director of the non-profit Fur Trade Research Center since 1998. In addition to numerous articles in journals and magazines, he has also authored Obstinate Hope: The Western Expeditions of Nathaniel J. Wyeth, 1832-33 and Pierre’s Hole! The Fur Trade History of Teton Valley, Idaho.

Hardee acted as historical and technical advisor to the History Channel’s program on fur trader Jedediah Smith and was featured in that program, as well as several other documentaries about the fur trade. In 2016, Hardee was the recipient of Idaho State Historical Society’s esteemed Esto Perpetua award. He has presented research papers at symposiums and history conferences across the nation.

His presentation will focus on Mexico’s northern provinces in the 1820s. As governor of the Santa Fe province, in defiance of federal decrees that barred foreign trappers, Bartolomé Baca saw the fur trade as a solution to Santa Fe’s financial hardships and opened trade in Mexican goods, pelts and silver coins to the U.S.

As beaver populations were depleted, trappers were forced to look farther afield. Hardee’s presentation will examine the search for beaver by mountaineers based out of northern New Mexico and other districts of the southern Rocky Mountains.