fur trade

fur trade in American history. Trade in animal skins and pelts had gone on since antiquity, but reached its height in the wilderness of North America from the 17th to the early 19th cent. The demand for furs was an important factor in the commercial life of all the British and Dutch seaboard colonies, as well as of S Louisiana, Texas, and the far Southwest. But its effect in opening the wilderness was even more striking in Canada, where the rivers and lakes offered avenues to the heart of the continent. The speed with which fur traders traveled halfway across the continent was remarkable. The Great Lakes region was extensively exploited by men buying furs from the Native Americans before the end of the 17th cent.

The effect on the indigenous peoples who received the white man's goods (including firearms and liquor, as well as diseases previously unknown to them) in exchange for the furs was cataclysmic; native cultures were overturned. This process also occurred among the natives of far NE Siberia as Russian traders reached that remote region in the 18th cent. The promyshlenniki [fur traders] pushed even farther across the icy seas and prepared the way for the long Russian occupation of Alaska .

The Great Trading Companies

The greatest of the British trading companies, the Hudson's Bay Company , contended after 1670 with the French traders in Canada, and after Canada became British in 1763, with French and Scottish traders based in Montreal. The North West Company was created, and rivalry was bitter until the two companies were combined in 1821, taking the name Hudson's Bay Company. The largest of the companies in the United States was John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company , which also came into conflict with the North West Company, notably in 1812-13 at the Pacific coast establishment of Astoria . By that time the Canadian traders had set up posts across the continent (first crossed in the north by Sir Alexander Mackenzie ) and had neared the Russian posts in Alaska.

Movement West

A U.S. law in 1816 excluded British traders from the United States, and many British fur traders who had helped to build the Old Northwest were compelled to become U.S. citizens and were reluctant to comply. The trade in the United States was now pushing west ahead of the advancing line of settlement, and the rich fur territories of the upper Missouri River, which had been tapped earlier by such traders as Manuel Lisa and Andrew Henry, attracted attention. After the first expedition of William Henry Ashley in 1823, the now celebrated mountain men (chief among them Kit Carson , Jedediah Smith , James Bridger , and Thomas Fitzpatrick ), who were trappers more than they were traders, made the Rocky Mt. West known.

Decline

The popularity of the beaver hat had helped to create an enormous demand for beaver, which was the staple article of the American fur trade, but fashion changed, and the fur trade declined accordingly. An equally important factor in the decline of fur trade was the advance of settlement, for the trade in wild furs could not flourish on a large scale near farms. Finally, there was the depletion of the stock of beaver and other fur-bearing animals, hunted relentlessly for centuries; the square miles of beaver country were shrinking to acres. The era of the fur traders ended in the 1840s in the United States and S Canada, but only after the traders had contributed vast amounts of geographic knowledge and lore learned from the Native Americans to the benefit of both nations.

Bibliography

There are innumerable studies of the history of the fur trade, many of them monographs on particular areas or particular traders. For a detailed bibliography see P. C. Phillips, The Fur Trade (2 vol., 1961). Other general works include H. M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade in the Far West (1902, repr. 1954); K. Kelsey, Young Men So Daring: Fur Traders Who Carried the Frontier West (1956); M. Sandoz, The Beaver Men (1964); L. O. Saum, The Fur Trader and the Indian (1965); J. E. Sunder, The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri 1840-1865 (1965); E. E. Rich, The Fur Trade and the Northwest to 1857 (1967); A. MacKenzie, Exploring the Northwest Territory, (ed. by T. H. McDonald, 1967); G. Simpson, Fur Trade and Empire: George Simpson's Journal (rev. ed. 1968).

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