Manuel Lisa was a Spanish-American merchant and fur trader who established trading posts on the upper Missouri River in the early nineteenth century. As a founder of the Missouri Fur Company and later an American Indian agent, he worked within complex commercial and diplomatic relationships with Plains and river communities.
The biographical record places the beginning of Manuel Lisa’s life at New Orleans and the end at St. Louis, giving the career a geographical span that is not apparent from the headline events alone.
In W. Michael Gear’s The River: A Novel of the American West, in 1812, the condemned John Tylor tries to escape the consequences of his involvement in the Burr conspiracy by signing on as a boatman with Manuel Lisa’s expedition up the Missouri.