FUR TRADE
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For as long as people have lived in the Americas, they have sought out the furs and hides of land- ad sea- based animals. Most were acquired for personal use in clothing, shelter, and watercraft. Even after contact with Europeans, the majority of furs and hides taken by Native Americans from North Americans abundant wildlife populations were put to domestic use. Some tribes had better access to fur-bearing animals than others; moreover, some groups were less interested in specializing in hide procurement than in other activities. Furs were but part of the elaborate trade networks that developed from this continent's ancient system of commodity exchange. Most often tribes in linguistic affiliation with each other traded on a regular and continuous basis, sending relatives back and forth between villages or camps.
———The entry of Europeans into native trade and social systems occurred in stages. The first European-Indian fur trade began as an offshoot of European interest in the cod fisheries of the North Atlantic from the 1490s through the 1580s. To Europeans, whose wildlife had undergone heavy population reductions to serve their own tables and wardrobes, North America appeared a treasure trove. In the early days of the fur trade, European fishermen wanted only "fancy furs," such as sable, mink, otter, and ermine, used for the finest coats and collars or trimmings both back home and in Asia. As the market for these furs expanded, less desirable pelts also grew attractive. By the mid-sixteenth century, itinerant French corsairs sailing along the southern Atlantic seaboard began taking on board large quantities of marten pelts and deerskins, obtained from Coastal Algonquians in exchange for metal hardware, cloth, and what most Europeans though of as baubles and trinkets.
———As the deerskin trade took hold in the Southwest, beaver (Castor canadensis) joined the list of fancy furs in the Northeast and in the interior. The stimulus was European induced. Beaver had been reported in abundance from Jaques Cartier's expeditions to the St. Lawrence (1534-43), and hatmakers in Paris became eager to import increasing quantities of the marvelous furs, which were sturdy, flexible, and resistant to both water and wind. European felt markers preferred North American beaver because the underhairs of this well insulated animal could be bound together fairly consistently to make a high grade of hat.
———At first all beaver skins were procured by Indians. White trappers and hunters avoided competing with native hunters and their trading partners in order to maintain god relations with their trading allies. This understanding did not last long in most theaters of the North American fur trade, however, and mercantile interests, determined to make their presence felt beyond coastlines, soon penetrating to new territories. Seizing greater profits to be gleaned from the interior, Europeans leveraged their way and sought direct contact with the native people who had access to furs.
———The result of this commercial expansion was the disruption of traditional alliances and the exclamation of inter-Indian rivalries. In the Northwest, the first product of this change was the era of the protracted Iroquois Wars in the mid-seventeenth century. During that period the Hurons, the major middlemen of the Great Lakes, were nearly destroyed by the Iroquois and their Dutch and English trading partners. Farther north, the royal chartering of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670 brought the English into the subarctic region, where they hoped to wrest profits from the westward-expanding French based in Montreal. For the next century, the French and English were at each other's throats across western Canada as they vied for native allegiance and trade.
———Responding to the English challenge, the French sent explorers, missionaries, and Coureurs do bois (licensed traders) into uncharted western lands. The scheme worked. By 1680, an estimated eight hundred French traders were gathering furs in the interior for transshipment back to Montreal. In the eighteenth century the French continued this expansion, building posts at strategic junctions such as Detroit (1701) and intermarrying with Indian women. Both policies served them well: by 1763 the French had acquired the major share of furs harvested in North America.
———The French were less successful in wresting allegiance and furs from the Indians who traded at Hudson's Bay. Some furs trickled down to them from the James Bay Crees and other tribes of the interior; most did not. As long as the HBC did not tamper with middlemen, especially the Western Crees and Assiniboines, furs continued to be brought to the company, ultimately arriving at York Factory for shipment by water to London in 1713, at the Treaty of Utecht, the French conceded Hudson Bay to the English, but they would continue to tap a percentage of the interior trade until New France fell to the British in 1763.
———Unlike the French, who wove diplomatic and imperial considerations into their business decisions, the Hudson's Bay Company traders were interested only in remaining profitable. And they did from 1713 to 1763. After 1763 the HBC forced new competition from old French firms in Montreal, now reincarnated as the North West Company. Led by a mix of English, Scottish, and New England merchants and traders, this company saw opportunity in continuing the old French system and drawing on the experience of French Canadians. From the late 1770s up through the war of 1812, the North West Company moved rapidly and aggressively deep into the North American interior and on to the Pacific Coast, mapping the land, building new posts, and securing Indian friendships among tribes through the inclusion of their provisioners and hunters in all operations.
———The success of the North West Company forced the HBC to give up its complacent perch on Hudson Bay. For the next forty-seven years the two clashed, each trying to drive the other out of preferred Indian trade zones. Finally, in 1821, after absorbing all rivals, the two companies merged, retaining the older name of Hudson's Bay Company.
———During the early nineteenth century, as environments changed with wildlife reduction, Indian households took on new looks. Traders introduced new goods and foodstuffs that enabled Indian families to spend more time in fur production and less time making tools, utensils, and clothing. Copper kettles, metal awls, files, knives, hatchets, and axes as well as guns, spear points, fishhooks, blankets, commercial rope and netting, and clothing became standard in Indian households. This path was an irreversible one, but it did not lead immediately to complete dependency on white traders. During this intermediary stage of the trade, Indians still controlled their lands and retained (but rarely used) the power to evict white companies.
———Several factors encouraged stable relations between Indians and their trading partners. Most Indians were not politically unified or confederated, and so were not inclined to challenge the European system as a whole. Moreover, following the example of the French, many British and Scottish traders had married into Indian families, and the offspring of these unions formed a new people, the Metis, who served as a constant bridge between the Indian and white worlds. Of equal importance to material and biological fusion was the weakening effect wrought by the fur trade on tribal lifeways. Alcohol, for example, was a constant presence. Many Indian groups came to expect liquor as a present prior to commencing trade. Brandy and furs became inseparable early in the trade on the East Coast and remained the pattern as the trade expanded westward. More serious was a new element the Europeans could not effectively control — disease. Lacking immunity or resistance to many communicable germs, trading Indians seldom escaped outbreaks of epidemics such as measles, mumps, and influenza. Of these and many others, by far the greatest killer was smallpox, which reached every fur-producing region of North American between 1760 and 1890.
———Between HBC reorganization in 1821 and Canadian Confederation in 1867, an event that prompted the final withdrawal of the HBC from posts south of the present U.S.-Canadian border, Indians faced new challenges across North America. In the eastern interior, Americans continued the colonial practice of buying raccoon, deer, and muskrat pelts from both Indians and whites for very little money. Many firms competed with each other and with the American Fur Company, a New York-based giant of the industry, founded in 1808 by John Jacob Astor, who planned to build a chain of posts from the Great Lakes to the Pacific. Although few Indians worked directly as wage earners for Astor or any other company, they continued to be the major procurers of furs of their own lands. Whites who trapped on their own did so at their peril. Most tribes had sanctions by species, by gender, and by season on which animals could be asked to give up their lives for humans. White trappers scoured many regions of North America indiscriminately, creating confrontation and stimulating a native need for more furs and more guns to protect their interests. Beaver pelts from the Rocky Mountains and the northern plains continued to be in great demand, but they grew increasingly difficult to find and became less marketable than South American nutria (Myocastor coypus) skins and silk. By 1835, beavers had been superseded in number and in importance by raccoons in the Old Northwest (raccoon had become the dominant fur in the American trade by the 1840s) and the bison in the western territories.
———Elsewhere, on the Pacific Coast and in the Far North, the fur trade brought parallel distress to animals and to dependent human populations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many species of pelagic mammals were hunted to near exhaustion. Sea otters, seals, walruses, and whales while they lasted. Among humans, the Aleuts suffered the most. Beginning in 1762, Russian colonized Alaska, employing well-tested policies of taking hostages in exchange for servile labor. Several generations of Aleuts labored as hostage slaves for Russian masters, supplying countless furs from the continental shelf and offshore islands to keep relatives alive. Along the coast of British Columbia, native traders continued to dictate terms of the trade as the volume and variety of foreign vessels in their home waters escalated. The Haidas, Nootkas, Bella Coolas, and Makahs witnessed fierce international competition for their resources, beginning with Spanish and English voyages to the region in the 1770s. Superb whalers and fishermen as well as keen traders and power brokers, these tribes were represented by headmen not to be outdone by foreign ship captains. Although that retention of control eroded across time, it remained a hallmark for this region well into the second half of the nineteenth century.
———In 1846, the fur trade took on features that reflected modernization and shifting international boundaries. The HBC and the American Fur Company continued to purchase furs from Indians on both sides of the international boundary, but the California and Fraser River gold rushes, as well as the rapid movement of settlers into the western territories and states, forced a diversification of local economies. In the United States many trading posts were sold to the U.S. Army; others were abandoned. In canada, the British retreated to Vancouver Island and the Arctic interior, leaving many unresolved land and wildlife problems to a largely unsympathetic populace eager to acquire gold, farms, and the commercial fisheries.
———By the mid-nineteenth century the United States was wrestling unsuccessfully with the legacy and continued practice of exploitation of resources on Indian lands by private parties. The Dominion of Canada did better, regulating settlement in an orderly manner by law and to a degree, by practice. The Indian Act of 1868 levied strict penalties for trespass on Indian lands and was enforced through a national police force. A series of treaties created reserves, reducing the native land base but guaranteeing subsistence and trapping activities on Crown (public) lands as well as the parcels set aside for natives only. These treaty rights applied to most Indians in western Canada and were later extended to tribes across the country.
———After 1867, entrepreneurs from Britain, Canada, and the United States expanded their activities in the Far North, trapping into the rich wildlife of the High Arctic, the Yukon, and Alaska. The pribilof Islands yielded over 100,000 fur-seal pelts per year and contributed to a rise in volume and in value of furs processed in the United States up to 1890, when the seal population ws recognized as nearly depleted. Skunk and mink joined fur seals and bison as major U.S. exports to Great Britain during this period. The completion of transcontinental railroads in the United States after 1869 and in Canada after 1885 heralded a new era in Indian-white relations. Agrarian interests and the fur trade did not mix well. In western North America, Canada — wolves, coyotes, and foxes — as well as bears, cougars, and badgers faced farmers, rangers, and townspoeple eager to see their end. In the twentieth century, the demand for fancy coats and hats in eastern and European cities kept Canadian hunters busy in the Far North, where the HBC faced challenges from itinerants and large merchants with easy access to the new railway lines connecting Edmonton and Winnipeg with Vancouver and Montreal. The Yukon and Northwest Territories served as new wildlife frontiers, but stiff competition and native determination to harvest selectively kept many species viable in the mixed economy of the twentieth century. By 1932, the HBC's share of the Canadian fur trade had declined to 42 percent. In 1957 York Factory closed its doors, and in the 1980s the HBC sold its Northern Stores subdivision, retaining only its retail department stores under the corporate name "The Bay."
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WILLIAM R. SWAGERTY
University of Idaho
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