Languages of the Fur Trade at Bent's Fort

A living history council between the Army and the Cheyenne at Bent's Old Fort. NPS.

Communication was everything

Bent, St. Vrain & Company couldn't trade without understanding its Native customers — and they couldn't understand the company without communication. It took many forms: spoken words, hand signs, drawings, flashing mirrors, smoke and the exchange of gifts, all meant to pass thoughts, feelings, wants and needs from one group to another. In the nineteenth-century borderlands, successful communication made successful trading posts.

The interpreters

Among the fort's employees were interpreters William Guerrier and John Smith, who bridged Native languages and English.

• Guerrier: Lt. James Abert named him the Cheyenne translator in 1845, noting that long residence among the Cheyenne let him repeat all their "graceful and expressive gestures."
• Smith: Lewis Garrard called him adept in the Cheyenne tongue in 1846, and Abert thought he spoke it "better, perhaps than any other white person in the country."
• Limits: years among the tribes taught these traders words and signs, but Native people sometimes judged their interpreting poor.
• To Washington: urged by Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, interpreters traveled with chiefs to St. Louis, Philadelphia and Washington. Smith took Southern Cheyenne leaders to the White House three times, interpreting before Presidents Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

Learning Cheyenne

At the fort, Abert spent several hours a day studying Cheyenne and found the English alphabet enough to write all its sounds. He blamed learners' trouble on the Cheyenne habit of swallowing the last syllable of each word — easy for newcomers to miss and drop, leaving them misunderstood — and admired the number words: each digit had its own name, and the tens were formed by adding endings to the digits.

From Abert's Cheyenne notes at Bent's Fort, September 5, 1846 (his spellings):

Signs: the common language of the plains

Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Ute and Lakota were all spoken across the Bent trading empire. So many languages made hand signs the plains' lingua franca.

• Economy: just 75 or 100 signs could carry a long conversation.
• Expression: fingers, hands and arms were clasped, shaken, stiffened, lowered, bounced, crossed and curved.
• Range: skilled signers conveyed time, numbers, seasons, nature and emotions, with signs for chiefs, elders, warriors, children, men and women.

A cultural crossroads

Traders, missionaries and the U.S. government all needed to talk with Native peoples. In the Bent's Fort era, Anglo men — and later their mixed-heritage sons and daughters — translated tribal languages for merchants, travelers and Indian agents. Words and signs carried the exchange of customs and goods that made Bent's Fort a cultural crossroads and a landmark of westward expansion.

Sources

Based on "Languages of the Fur Trade," Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site, National Park Service, quoting Lt. James W. Abert and Lewis Garrard; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article's individually credited photograph is replaced by an NPS photograph.