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7 fur trade The fur trade, the commerce in animal skins and pelts, has played a significant part in world exploration and development. Trade in furs has taken place since ancient times in all hemispheres and among various peoples. Yet it is most directly tied in with the history of exploration in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in northern parts of North America and in Siberia in eastern Asia. Europeans of all the colonial powers, especially in the 16th through 18th centuries—the French, Dutch, English, Russians, and, to a lesser extent, the Spanish—bartered trade goods, such as iron tools and utensils, cloth, glass beads, firearms, and alcoholic beverages, with indigenous peoples in order to fulfill a demand for furs in Europe, especially beaver pelts for felt for the making of hats with brims, a fashion style that first caught on in the 1580s. But the pelts of other animals, such as muskrat, mink, marten, fox, sea otter, and seal, were also sought. After the founding of the United States, Euro-Americans continued working the fur trade. Some became hunters and trappers themselves. And some native peoples acted as middlemen between other tribes and the European or Euro-American traders. The fur trade involved the capture of fur-bearing animals through hunting and trapping, skinning them, then transporting the skins for processing into fur clothing and felt. French Trade In early colonial times, the French most thoroughly exploited the fur trade. Whereas mining and the raising of livestock had a greater economic bearing on the development of Spanish colonies, and farming dominated the economy and land use of the English colonies, commerce in furs determined French expansion. The French and Indian fur trade began with rintPage('EAHI068','AmericanHistory');">Jacques Cartier in 1534 along the St. Lawrence River. His original intent had been to find a rintPage('EAHI277','AmericanHistory');">Northwest Passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and gain maritime access to the Orient, but he found instead an untapped source of furs among Native Americans, who were eager to trade for European goods. rintPage('EAHII070','AmericanHistory');">Samuel de Champlain began colonizing New France in 1604, with trade with Native Americans central to the colony's economy. Over the next years, Champlain explored the northern woods and established trade agreements with various tribes to deliver their pelts to French trading posts. Port Royal in rintPage('EAHI004','AmericanHistory');">Acadia (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia), Quebec City, and Montreal all became thriving centers of commerce. Eastern rintPage('ind2311','AmericanHistory');">Algonquian-speaking tribes, such as the Cree, rintPage('ind2310','AmericanHistory');">Algonkin, rintPage('ind2389','AmericanHistory');">Montagnais, rintPage('ind2393','AmericanHistory');">Naskapi, rintPage('ind2306','AmericanHistory');">Abenaki, and rintPage('ind2381','AmericanHistory');">Micmac, were all involved in the French fur trade. Yet the Iroquoian-speaking Huron (Wyandot) became the foremost suppliers. From the years 1616 to 1649, the Huron, in conjunction with the Algonquian Ottawa and Nipissing, developed a trading empire among Native Americans from the Great Lakes to the Hudson Bay to the St. Lawrence. Each of the three main trading partners had its own river and portage route for travel by canoe, plus a yearly schedule, linking them up with each other and other tribes as well. Acting as middlemen, the Huron traded agricultural products to other tribes for pelts, which they then carried to the French in Quebec city or Montreal, to trade for European wares. In their flotillas of canoes, now laden with goods, they then completed the trade circle, returning to other peoples to exchange some of the European trade goods for still more furs. This complex trade relationship lasted until the mid-17th century, ending with the military and economic expansion from the south by the five Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—who at the time were trading partners of the Dutch working out of Fort Orange (present-day Albany) in New Netherland. The Dutch also carried out some trade for furs with the Algonquian-speaking Lenni Lenape (Delaware) and Wappinger Indians out of New Amsterdam in present-day New York City. In the meantime, many Frenchmen, some of them sponsored by de Champlain and others by the Catholic Church, were venturing along lakes and rivers into the wilderness in search of new sources for furs. Many more would follow. The men who earned a livelihood by paddling large canoes into the wilderness in quest of furs for licensed traders came to be known as voyageurs; the independent, unlicensed entrepreneurs who defied regulations, many of them living among the native population, became known as coureurs de bois. Both voyageurs and coureurs de bois would propagate a group of people associated for years with the fur trade—the Métis—mixed-bloods of predominantly French and native descent, or of Scottish and native descent, especially Cree, Chippewa, and Assiniboine. The fur market varied in profitability, one crash occurring in 1696. Yet the French fur trade expanded into new regions. Under royal management, New France extended its territory from the Great Lakes across the Mississippi River into the Louisiana Territory. Pierre-Antoine Mallet and his brother Paul as well as Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Vérendrye helped open the trans-Mississippi region in the first half of the 18th century. French traders also expanded their markets in the south, from settlements along the Gulf Coast northwestward along the Mississippi and Red Rivers—parts of present-day Louisiana and Texas. New Orleans, founded in 1718, became a bustling center of commerce. And during the 18th century, the French established a special trade relationship with the Taovaya in the Southwest, the French name for both Wichita and Caddo Indians, who acted as middlemen for them as the Huron had done for the French the century before. British Trade England, after the takeover of New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664, inherited a trade relationship with the Iroquois. They also developed trade relations with tribes in the fur-rich untapped Hudson Bay region. Claim to the area was based on the voyage of Henry Hudson in 1610. The fur-trading expedition of Médard Chouart des Groseilliers and his brother-in-law Pierre-Esprit Radisson to the region in 1668–69 led to the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670. The English, rather than sending traders inland to collect furs as the French did, established trading posts for barter with the Indians—especially the Cree and Chipewayan—at the mouths of the large rivers that drained into the bay. Ships could come and go in the summertime when the northern waters were free of ice. At this time, England did not know the extent of Rupert's Land, as its northern holdings were called, after Prince Rupert, the Hudson's Bay Company's chief backer and first governor. The French also claimed the Hudson Bay region and sent out various military expeditions against British posts, with some successes, and continued to play a dominant role in the fur trade until England's ultimate victory in the French and Indian Wars and the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Starting in the 1780s, the Hudson's Bay Company also encountered fierce competition from the North West Company, founded by Scottish interests in Montreal. The rivalry spurred a period of extensive exploration in which new Indian contacts were established, especially among the tribes of the Canadian West. A "Nor'wester," Sir Alexander Mackenzie, became the first non-Indian to cross the North American continent north of Mexico in the early 1790s. David Thompson, who worked for both companies at different times in his career, mapped much of the Canadian West in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The two companies merged in 1821 under the name of the older company, and the Hudson's Bay Company thrived in the fur trade for years to come. Russian Trade During the period of conflict between France and Great Britain, Russia also began developing its fur trade. Russia had been a world source of furs for centuries, especially luxury furs. With fur-bearing animals depleted in western parts, the promyshlenniki—Russian fur traders and hunters—pushed eastward into Siberia. Early traders, such as Yerofey Pavlovich Khabarov, who explored the Amur River in southeastern Siberia in the mid-17th century, conducted some trade in the region. In the mid-18th century, Emelyan Basov, one of the Cossacks who explored eastern Russia, developed the fur trade as far as the Kamchatka Peninsula. In the years after Danish Vitus Jonassen Bering's and Russian Aleksey Ilyich Chirikov's voyage of exploration to Alaska on behalf of Russia in 1741, the promyshlenniki extended operations to North America, reaching the Aleutian Islands and the Alaskan mainland, where the sea otter was plentiful. In the early years, the traders formed ad hoc companies, with no rules governing their operations or their exploitative treatment of the Aleut, the native peoples on the Aleutian Islands, and the Inuit (Eskimo), on the mainland. The typical early Russian method of acquiring furs was to enter a native village, take hostages either by means of violence or with the threat of violence, pass out traps to the men, then demand furs in exchange for the lives of the women and children. If the men failed to deliver furs, hostages would be executed. Then, when the furs were collected, the Russians would depart until the next season. By the 1780s, British and American traders also worked the Pacific coast, especially in Nootka Sound in present-day British Columbia. But they also extended their activity to Alaska in the north and in California in the south. Ships would sail from Boston around South America to fur country, then transport the sea otter skins to China, where there was a great demand. To protect their territorial claims and economic interest, the Russians, under the impetus of Grigory Ivanovich Shelikov, and his employer, Ivana L. Golikiv, who had set up a base at Okhotsk in Siberia, began establishing permanent colonies, the first at Three Saints on Kodiak Island in 1784. Because of Shelikov's efforts and those of Aleksandr Andreevich Baranov, in his employ, in 1799, the Russian-American Company was chartered, with a monopoly in all Russian territory in North America. By 1812, that territory extended to northern California, where Fort Ross was founded near Bodega Bay. American Trade During colonial times, U.S. interests participated only minimally in the fur trade. The deerskin trade flourished in the Southeast, however. In 1808, John Jacob Astor founded the American Fur Company, having various subsidiaries to follow, such as the Pacific Fur Company, with a trading post at Astoria, Oregon, and the South West Company, operating near the Great Lakes. The next year, a group in St. Louis on the Mississippi River founded the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company. Among the partners were Jean Pierre Chouteau, his son Auguste Pierre Chouteau, Manuel Lisa, William Clark, Antoine Pierre Menard, and Andrew Henry. Both enterprises sponsored numerous expeditions into the western wilderness. In 1816, the American Congress enacted a law excluding British traders from the United States. Another American entrepreneur, William Henry Ashley, became a powerful force in the fur trade with his Rocky Mountain Fur Company, founded by him and Andrew Henry in 1822. Many of the men who worked for and traded with him came to be known as the mountain men. Among the most famous of them were Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Strong Smith, and William Lewis Sublette. In the 1820s–1830s, they traveled the Native American trails and passes of the West as hunters, trappers, and traders, and like the voyageurs and the coureurs de bois of French Canada, they learned wilderness survival skills from Native Americans. During these same years, the U.S. government also played a part in the fur trade, through a system of federal trading houses, called the "factory system." From 1790 to 1799, the U.S. Congress passed four Trade and Intercourse Acts pertaining to Indian affairs and commerce. Among other regulations, the acts provided for the appointment of Indian agents and licensing of federal traders, who could barter with the Indians for furs. In 1802, a follow-up Trade and Intercourse Act codified the four earlier ones. And, in 1806, an Office of Indian Trade was created within the War Department to administer the federal trading houses. The "factory system" was abolished in 1822, at which time provisions were made for the licensing of independent traders, who were better able to operate in the wilderness. The international fur market experienced a decline starting in the late 1830s, partly because the beaver hat went out of style in favor of the silk hat. Other factors contributed to the end of the centuries-long fur boom: the depletion of fur-bearing animals and the advance of farming settlements. As for the mountain men and other counterparts, many of them stayed active in the American West long after the fur decline, as soldiers, scouts, and guides. In 1867, Russia gave up its North American venture and sold Alaska to the United States, and in 1869, the Hudson's Bay Company sold off its vast territorial holdings to the Canadian government. Yet the fur trade had made its mark in the history of exploration; the traders had pioneered routes, mapped vast regions, and opened up vast areas to non-Indian settlement and other types of commercial development. Nowadays, the fur trade is still carried out in the far north, mostly by indigenous peoples.
The fur trade, the commerce in animal skins and pelts, has played a significant part in world exploration and development. Trade in furs has taken place since ancient times in all hemispheres and among various peoples. Yet it is most directly tied in with the history of exploration in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in northern parts of North America and in Siberia in eastern Asia. Europeans of all the colonial powers, especially in the 16th through 18th centuries—the French, Dutch, English, Russians, and, to a lesser extent, the Spanish—bartered trade goods, such as iron tools and utensils, cloth, glass beads, firearms, and alcoholic beverages, with indigenous peoples in order to fulfill a demand for furs in Europe, especially beaver pelts for felt for the making of hats with brims, a fashion style that first caught on in the 1580s. But the pelts of other animals, such as muskrat, mink, marten, fox, sea otter, and seal, were also sought. After the founding of the United States, Euro-Americans continued working the fur trade. Some became hunters and trappers themselves. And some native peoples acted as middlemen between other tribes and the European or Euro-American traders. The fur trade involved the capture of fur-bearing animals through hunting and trapping, skinning them, then transporting the skins for processing into fur clothing and felt. French Trade In early colonial times, the French most thoroughly exploited the fur trade. Whereas mining and the raising of livestock had a greater economic bearing on the development of Spanish colonies, and farming dominated the economy and land use of the English colonies, commerce in furs determined French expansion. The French and Indian fur trade began with Jacques Cartier in 1534 along the St. Lawrence River. His original intent had been to find a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and gain maritime access to the Orient, but he found instead an untapped source of furs among Native Americans, who were eager to trade for European goods. Samuel de Champlain began colonizing New France in 1604, with trade with Native Americans central to the colony's economy. Over the next years, Champlain explored the northern woods and established trade agreements with various tribes to deliver their pelts to French trading posts. Port Royal in Acadia (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia), Quebec City, and Montreal all became thriving centers of commerce. Eastern Algonquian-speaking tribes, such as the Cree, Algonkin, Montagnais, Naskapi, Abenaki, and Micmac, were all involved in the French fur trade. Yet the Iroquoian-speaking Huron (Wyandot) became the foremost suppliers. From the years 1616 to 1649, the Huron, in conjunction with the Algonquian Ottawa and Nipissing, developed a trading empire among Native Americans from the Great Lakes to the Hudson Bay to the St. Lawrence. Each of the three main trading partners had its own river and portage route for travel by canoe, plus a yearly schedule, linking them up with each other and other tribes as well. Acting as middlemen, the Huron traded agricultural products to other tribes for pelts, which they then carried to the French in Quebec city or Montreal, to trade for European wares. In their flotillas of canoes, now laden with goods, they then completed the trade circle, returning to other peoples to exchange some of the European trade goods for still more furs. This complex trade relationship lasted until the mid-17th century, ending with the military and economic expansion from the south by the five Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—who at the time were trading partners of the Dutch working out of Fort Orange (present-day Albany) in New Netherland. The Dutch also carried out some trade for furs with the Algonquian-speaking Lenni Lenape (Delaware) and Wappinger Indians out of New Amsterdam in present-day New York City. In the meantime, many Frenchmen, some of them sponsored by de Champlain and others by the Catholic Church, were venturing along lakes and rivers into the wilderness in search of new sources for furs. Many more would follow. The men who earned a livelihood by paddling large canoes into the wilderness in quest of furs for licensed traders came to be known as voyageurs; the independent, unlicensed entrepreneurs who defied regulations, many of them living among the native population, became known as coureurs de bois. Both voyageurs and coureurs de bois would propagate a group of people associated for years with the fur trade—the Métis—mixed-bloods of predominantly French and native descent, or of Scottish and native descent, especially Cree, Chippewa, and Assiniboine. The fur market varied in profitability, one crash occurring in 1696. Yet the French fur trade expanded into new regions. Under royal management, New France extended its territory from the Great Lakes across the Mississippi River into the Louisiana Territory. Pierre-Antoine Mallet and his brother Paul as well as Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Vérendrye helped open the trans-Mississippi region in the first half of the 18th century. French traders also expanded their markets in the south, from settlements along the Gulf Coast northwestward along the Mississippi and Red Rivers—parts of present-day Louisiana and Texas. New Orleans, founded in 1718, became a bustling center of commerce. And during the 18th century, the French established a special trade relationship with the Taovaya in the Southwest, the French name for both Wichita and Caddo Indians, who acted as middlemen for them as the Huron had done for the French the century before. British Trade England, after the takeover of New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664, inherited a trade relationship with the Iroquois. They also developed trade relations with tribes in the fur-rich untapped Hudson Bay region. Claim to the area was based on the voyage of Henry Hudson in 1610. The fur-trading expedition of Médard Chouart des Groseilliers and his brother-in-law Pierre-Esprit Radisson to the region in 1668–69 led to the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670. The English, rather than sending traders inland to collect furs as the French did, established trading posts for barter with the Indians—especially the Cree and Chipewayan—at the mouths of the large rivers that drained into the bay. Ships could come and go in the summertime when the northern waters were free of ice. At this time, England did not know the extent of Rupert's Land, as its northern holdings were called, after Prince Rupert, the Hudson's Bay Company's chief backer and first governor. The French also claimed the Hudson Bay region and sent out various military expeditions against British posts, with some successes, and continued to play a dominant role in the fur trade until England's ultimate victory in the French and Indian Wars and the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Starting in the 1780s, the Hudson's Bay Company also encountered fierce competition from the North West Company, founded by Scottish interests in Montreal. The rivalry spurred a period of extensive exploration in which new Indian contacts were established, especially among the tribes of the Canadian West. A "Nor'wester," Sir Alexander Mackenzie, became the first non-Indian to cross the North American continent north of Mexico in the early 1790s. David Thompson, who worked for both companies at different times in his career, mapped much of the Canadian West in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The two companies merged in 1821 under the name of the older company, and the Hudson's Bay Company thrived in the fur trade for years to come. Russian Trade During the period of conflict between France and Great Britain, Russia also began developing its fur trade. Russia had been a world source of furs for centuries, especially luxury furs. With fur-bearing animals depleted in western parts, the promyshlenniki—Russian fur traders and hunters—pushed eastward into Siberia. Early traders, such as Yerofey Pavlovich Khabarov, who explored the Amur River in southeastern Siberia in the mid-17th century, conducted some trade in the region. In the mid-18th century, Emelyan Basov, one of the Cossacks who explored eastern Russia, developed the fur trade as far as the Kamchatka Peninsula. In the years after Danish Vitus Jonassen Bering's and Russian Aleksey Ilyich Chirikov's voyage of exploration to Alaska on behalf of Russia in 1741, the promyshlenniki extended operations to North America, reaching the Aleutian Islands and the Alaskan mainland, where the sea otter was plentiful. In the early years, the traders formed ad hoc companies, with no rules governing their operations or their exploitative treatment of the Aleut, the native peoples on the Aleutian Islands, and the Inuit (Eskimo), on the mainland. The typical early Russian method of acquiring furs was to enter a native village, take hostages either by means of violence or with the threat of violence, pass out traps to the men, then demand furs in exchange for the lives of the women and children. If the men failed to deliver furs, hostages would be executed. Then, when the furs were collected, the Russians would depart until the next season. By the 1780s, British and American traders also worked the Pacific coast, especially in Nootka Sound in present-day British Columbia. But they also extended their activity to Alaska in the north and in California in the south. Ships would sail from Boston around South America to fur country, then transport the sea otter skins to China, where there was a great demand. To protect their territorial claims and economic interest, the Russians, under the impetus of Grigory Ivanovich Shelikov, and his employer, Ivana L. Golikiv, who had set up a base at Okhotsk in Siberia, began establishing permanent colonies, the first at Three Saints on Kodiak Island in 1784. Because of Shelikov's efforts and those of Aleksandr Andreevich Baranov, in his employ, in 1799, the Russian-American Company was chartered, with a monopoly in all Russian territory in North America. By 1812, that territory extended to northern California, where Fort Ross was founded near Bodega Bay. American Trade During colonial times, U.S. interests participated only minimally in the fur trade. The deerskin trade flourished in the Southeast, however. In 1808, John Jacob Astor founded the American Fur Company, having various subsidiaries to follow, such as the Pacific Fur Company, with a trading post at Astoria, Oregon, and the South West Company, operating near the Great Lakes. The next year, a group in St. Louis on the Mississippi River founded the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company. Among the partners were Jean Pierre Chouteau, his son Auguste Pierre Chouteau, Manuel Lisa, William Clark, Antoine Pierre Menard, and Andrew Henry. Both enterprises sponsored numerous expeditions into the western wilderness. In 1816, the American Congress enacted a law excluding British traders from the United States. Another American entrepreneur, William Henry Ashley, became a powerful force in the fur trade with his Rocky Mountain Fur Company, founded by him and Andrew Henry in 1822. Many of the men who worked for and traded with him came to be known as the mountain men. Among the most famous of them were Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Strong Smith, and William Lewis Sublette. In the 1820s–1830s, they traveled the Native American trails and passes of the West as hunters, trappers, and traders, and like the voyageurs and the coureurs de bois of French Canada, they learned wilderness survival skills from Native Americans. During these same years, the U.S. government also played a part in the fur trade, through a system of federal trading houses, called the "factory system." From 1790 to 1799, the U.S. Congress passed four Trade and Intercourse Acts pertaining to Indian affairs and commerce. Among other regulations, the acts provided for the appointment of Indian agents and licensing of federal traders, who could barter with the Indians for furs. In 1802, a follow-up Trade and Intercourse Act codified the four earlier ones. And, in 1806, an Office of Indian Trade was created within the War Department to administer the federal trading houses. The "factory system" was abolished in 1822, at which time provisions were made for the licensing of independent traders, who were better able to operate in the wilderness. The international fur market experienced a decline starting in the late 1830s, partly because the beaver hat went out of style in favor of the silk hat. Other factors contributed to the end of the centuries-long fur boom: the depletion of fur-bearing animals and the advance of farming settlements. As for the mountain men and other counterparts, many of them stayed active in the American West long after the fur decline, as soldiers, scouts, and guides. In 1867, Russia gave up its North American venture and sold Alaska to the United States, and in 1869, the Hudson's Bay Company sold off its vast territorial holdings to the Canadian government. Yet the fur trade had made its mark in the history of exploration; the traders had pioneered routes, mapped vast regions, and opened up vast areas to non-Indian settlement and other types of commercial development. Nowadays, the fur trade is still carried out in the far north, mostly by indigenous peoples.
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