Video
Clerks Office Talk
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Fort Union. Welcome to the second most important room in the entire fort. This is the clerk's office. This is where all of the company paperwork would have been done in the historic period. And it is a very special room for another reason, because it is one of the few rooms that we have an actual sketch of the inside. So Rudolf Friedrich Kurz, in 1851, does a sketch of this room. A meeting between Mr. Edwin Denig and Le Tout Pique is recorded in that sketch, as well as all of the items that are inside this room decorating it. From our painting of Mr. Denig, to our beaded bag, all the way up to our trade standard and deer head up above the fireplace, all of these items are noted inside this sketch. And sketches are very powerful because not only do they have the same ability as lists to tell us what is inside somewhere, they also tell us exactly where those things are and how they are hanging up. So this is, by far and away, our most accurate room inside our Fort's reconstruction. Not to say the others aren't accurate, just to say that this one, we know for sure this is what it would have looked like on this day in 1851. What is going on in this room in the day-to-day time frame is not actually meetings, it's actually a space for the clerks of the company to work on the company books, to work on records for the company, and to send letters up and down this river. So when you imagine communication in the 1850s, you've got to imagine they don't have phones, they don't have email. The only way to communicate over a long distance is sending someone with a really good memory, going there yourself, or you've got to send a letter. So because literacy, and particularly good literacy, is a sought after skill in this time frame, being a clerk is every bit as respectable as being someone like a blacksmith. And it's every bit as detailed. You've got to be able to read, you've got to be able to write, and you've got to be able to cipher. And ciphering is your basic accounting techniques-- your addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, and some other banking techniques, things of that nature. Because this is such an involved skill set, it's going to command $600 to $700 a year, somewhere in that neighborhood. And these Fort clerks are going to be elevated up to a fairly high status. They are going to eat at the high table inside the Bourgeois House, along with the traders and some of your other skilled craftsmen. And they are going to be the ones who are actually going to go out and do the Bourgeois' will. So if the Bourgeois wants a area near the Fort cleared for firewood, then they are going to be the ones to actually take those parties out to that area and clear it for firewood. So they are managing the young engages. They're managing the payroll. They're managing everything that's coming up here. And that is what makes this room the nerve center of the Fort. And if the trade house is the heart of the Fort, then this room much very much so is the brain.
Description
Learn how the Clerks Office functioned as the brain of Fort Union Trading Post.
Duration
2 minutes, 59 seconds
Credit
NPS / Sawyer Flynn
Date Created
12/30/2020
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