Fur Trade in North America

I

Introduction

Fur Trade in North America, trade in animal furs, generally conducted between indigenous peoples and Europeans in the northern part of the western hemisphere. The fur trade was a major economic incentive for European exploration. It involved trapping and skinning fur-bearing animals and then collecting the skins for processing into fur clothing and felt.

When French explorer Jacques Cartier visited eastern Canada in 1534, he was greeted by members of the Mi'kmaq nation holding fur-bearing animal skins, which they seemed to want to trade. Even at this early date, long before the settlement of Jamestown and Québec, visiting fishermen from France, England, and Spain had been bringing copper pots, glass beads, and iron knives and axheads to northeastern America and bartering them for furs. For the next 300 years the fur trade would drive the exploration of North America, shape relations with indigenous peoples, and affect the history of empires.

II

King Beaver

The earliest exchanges along the coast were a casual affair because Western Europeans were less interested in North American furs than in the luxury furs then being imported from Russia. But in the 1580s fashions changed, and European men and women started wearing felt hats with broad stiff brims. The best felt was made by matting together the woolly inner hair of the beaver, an animal that thrived in the numerous ponds and streams of northern North America. As a result, ships began visiting the Atlantic coast and specifically the St. Lawrence River to trade. When the Dutch, English, and French later settled this area, colonists particularly the French settlers in Canada took over this lucrative exchange. Beaver remained the most important fur until silk hats came into style in the 1830s, though the furs of muskrat, mink, marten, and other animals were also sought.

The popular image of the fur trapper is that of a bearded white man in fringed buckskin, but the fur harvest with few exceptions was the work of indigenous peoples. The men hunted the beaver, relying on traditional traps and snares as well as guns and, in recent times, steel traps. Women cleaned, stretched, and preserved the skins. The role of white men was usually restricted to trading and transporting goods; even so, they often depended on the help of country wives, indigenous women whom they married or lived with.

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The indigenous peoples used the fur trade to get goods they could not make for themselves. These included metal products, especially pots and cutting tools, but also blankets and decorative items such as glass beads. The fur trade gave them access to European technology without forcing them to abandon their homes or way of life. However, it also exposed them to disease, alcohol addiction, and, in the long run, economic dependency.

III

French Dominance

The French, who ruled Canada from 1608 to 1760, dominated the North American fur trade, partly because they occupied the St. Lawrence River, which gave access to the Great Lakes and the heart of the continent. The Canadian city of Montréal became prosperous as the main depot from which furs were shipped to Europe. Initially, indigenous people brought their furs there to trade, but soon itinerant French-Canadian fur traders called coureurs de bois (“woods rangers”) were paddling birchbark canoes westward in search of larger and cheaper supplies of beaver. Before the end of the 17th century, they had advanced as far as the Great Plains and linked the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River system. Renowned for daring and endurance, the coureurs de bois adopted native customs and skills and married into indigenous families. In time, the trade developed along regular capitalist lines as many of the independent coureurs de bois were reduced to working as hired hands for large fur companies. They continued, however, to blend French and indigenous elements in the way they lived.

IV

Competition Between Countries

Meanwhile, the Dutch and English were also eager to share in the profits of the trade. Neither nation produced anything quite like the coureur de bois, as they preferred to wait for the indigenous peoples to come to them with furs. The Dutch and later the English traded with the Iroquois confederacy from posts around Albany, New York. Traders from the New York and Pennsylvania colonies tried to break into the French monopoly of Great Lakes furs.

Starting in 1670, the English Hudson’s Bay Company pursued the business from the north, setting up posts at the mouths of rivers running into Hudson Bay and supplying them by sea from England through the frigid waters of the Arctic region. The English government granted the company a trading monopoly, and the power to make its own laws, over a vast region that came to be called Rupert’s Land, now in north central Canada.

The French and English were bitter rivals in North America, fighting a series of wars from 1689 to 1763. However, the fur trade was not a major cause of the fighting. The rivalry between the two powers was worldwide, and they pursued the fur trade, sometimes at a loss, to maintain indigenous allies for the North American phases of their wars. The French were much more successful in this respect, and war parties of their allies conducted devastating frontier raids on the English colonies.

Nevertheless the French lost the wars, and Britain captured Canada in 1760. However, Montréal’s dominant position in the fur trade continued after the British conquest. Merchants of British and American origin gradually replaced French entrepreneurs, while French Canadian employees continued to crew the canoe brigades.

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