Missive #414

The story of the American fur trade has been told many times from different viewpoints, but David Lavender was the first to place it within the overall contest for empire between Britain and the United States.Lavender is a writer of western history but in this book he has concentrated on the fur trade in the middle part of America. He does provide some history of the move into the Rocky Mountains but mostly as it involves Ramsay Cooks, the main character in the book. A good read. Rather than offering a simple hagiography of men like Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger and other legendary trappers, Lavender relates the story of men such as John Jacob Astor and Ramsay Crooks who competed with Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company for the fur resources of the Great Lakes region and the upper Missouri River country. Within this framework of contest and competition, Lavender shows how the American Fur Company learned to exploit the needs and wants of Indian tribes to gain a superior economic position over the British. The brutal and bloody rivalry helped Ramsay Crooks develop the techniques for transporting furs, supplying trappers, and selling pelts that made fur trapping such an integral economic activity in early U.S. history. — Book promo @ goodreads.com

I’m making progress, slowly but progress. See where I am and where I have been on my virtual I-5 walk by starting at 32.544246, -117.029877 and then 42.435691, -123.261826 as the destination.

I wonder what the numbers are for the United States? Perhaps we will find out if/when Trump is sworn in as president and Robert Kennedy Jr is confirmed. But then again perhaps we will not.

Official data released by the UK government has exposed an alarming explosion of deaths that only impacted people who received Covid mRNA “vaccines.” The data shows that the vaccinated population suffered a huge surge in deaths compared to the unvaccinated.
In the UK, approximately 30 percent of the population has never received a dose of the Covid “vaccine.” According to the UKHSA’s figures, 63.4 million people were eligible for vaccination at that point. 34 percent were not double vaccinated, and 50 percent were not triple vaccinated.
However, the vaccinated population accounted for 95 percent of all COVID-19 deaths between January and May 2023.
The unvaccinated population, meanwhile, accounted for just five percent of Covid deaths.
The vast majority of the deaths are among those vaccinated four times. This quad-vaxxed population accounts for 80 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, and 83 percent of all Covid deaths among the vaccinated. — 95 Percent Vaccinated Deaths by Vox Day

That great Christmas morning weather was just a gift from Mother Nature. The snowbirds got a sample of her true nature in the afternoon with wind gust of almost 30 mph. It was just above freezing this morning with the high forecast to be only 63°F. The 10 day forecast is for that to repeat every day during the period. Still winter.