Customer Reviews

Ft. Pontchartrain at Detroit: A Guide to the Daily Lives of Fur Trade and Military Personnel, Settlers, and Missionaries at French Posts (Volumes I and II)

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This massive 2 volume work was well documented, well illustrated with drawings, photos & maps, indexed and referenced. This is not another book that summarizes the same old stories with the same old characters. Through nearly a 1150 pages Mr. Kent gives us a personal portal into the everyday life at Fort Ponchartrain and surrounding area in relation to it's time in history and sets the bar higher for every future historian to attempt to match it's quality & expansive approach. Common trade items of the day are shown & discussed such as the various imported fishing hooks--but also how they were knotted! Spears, kettles, bells, tools, crooked knives, furniture, crosses, silver, axes, tomahawks, beads, decorations, weapons, rings, medals, etc all backed up in great detail by countless manifest lists, diary entries, and other documents. Nearly every aspect of the lives of these soldiers, priests, traders, carpenters, blacksmiths, middlemen, and voyageurs is meticulously laid out for us through thousands of French and English sources from around the world. Never before has a work of this scale been done that comes close to this concerning the fur trade.

Yes the price is not cheap, but considering the warehouse of information gathered, any serious reinactor, historian, or just history buff would consider the result priceless.

Timothy Kent has catalogued every known item to have shipped with or left behind by Cadillac to Ft. Pontchartrain, having gleaned the information from Cadillac's own manifests. His two-volume set obsessively ruminates over each and every item, revealing new found insights to life in New France during the 1700s.

Not only has the author translated Cadillac's manifests from French into English, he's scoured thousands of resources to identify and place each object, given examples of similiar items found or recorded at other historical sites, and related these items to modern day equivalents. The bibliography in itself is a treasure trove for researchers; the author has painstakenly referenced thousands of facts throughout the book - 300 citations for one chapter alone.

And although it's research references are invaluable, the book is very readable and enjoyable. Instead of the usual broad, sweeping historical narrative, Kent's book is a more intimate look into the day-to-day lives of these explorers. What did they eat? How did they cook? How did they build their houses? What clothes did they wear? These books bring the details to these explorer's stories that turn them from historical characters into flesh and blood ancestors.