Fur Trade. Animal pelts have probably been exchanged in North America since the beginning of human habitation, but large‐scale fur trade began only after the arrival of Europeans. As the Eastern Hemisphere's fur stocks dwindled, Europeans regarded North America as a fur reservoir and created flourishing trade systems in New York, the lower Mississippi River valley, and the Pacific Northwest. The principal fur‐trading arena stretched from the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley to the northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this region saw fierce rivalries among several American and Canadian enterprises that maintained hundreds of trading posts where Native trappers and processors bartered their deerskins and beaver, raccoon, and muskrat pelts for alcohol, firearms, metal tools, and other manufactured goods. The most powerful of these enterprises, John Jacob Astor's New York–based American Fur Company (1808–1865), featured several regional divisions and field offices and an elaborate international marketing system. Small, high‐value fur‐bearers dominated the American fur trade until the 1830s when declining beaver populations, replacement of beaver hats by silk ones, and the introduction of steamboat transportation shifted the emphasis to bison robe production. The robe trade thrived until the 1870s when the destruction of bison herds on the Great Plains ended the traditional fur trade. By the late twentieth century, the fur trade involved extensive importation as well as limited domestic production of mink, fox, and muskrat coats and accessories, which employed numerous individual trappers, hunters, fur breeders, and furriers.

Even during its peak, the fur industry amounted to only about one percent of the United States's gross national product, and in many areas it formed only a transient phase that soon yielded to mining, lumbering, and agriculture. Yet the fur trade integrated peripheral areas into the national economy by stimulating exploration and investment, and by boosting into prominence such distribution depots as St. Louis. The industry also wrought massive ecological changes. American “mountain men” virtually stripped the beaver from the central and northern Rocky Mountains in the 1820s and 1830s, and a three‐way battle among Russian, British, and American traders on the Pacific coast threatened the sea otter with extinction by the 1850s. For the Indians, who formed the bulk of the industry's workforce, the fur trade proved a decidedly mixed blessing. While it gave them new technologies, it also spread European diseases and tied the Native societies to a global economy over which they had little control.
See also French Settlements in North America; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900.

Bibliography

Paul C. Phillips , The Fur Trade, 2 vols., 1961.
David J. Wishart , The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807–1840, 1979.

Pekka Hämäläinen

FUR TRADE

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