Fur Trade

The fur trade is often considered America’s first continent-wide industry, dating from pre-Columbian contact in 1480. Basque fishermen working the cod banks off the coast of Newfoundland made initial contact with Native Americans. Because furs were fashionable, the fur trade flourished until the final days of the rendezvous in the Rocky Mountains in the 1840s. The fur trade also provided a vibrant connection between disparate groups of people.

The present-day United States and Canada were heavily populated with indigenous people before the 16^th century. European-born disease wreaked havoc on these populations, decimating some to the point of extinction. Those that survived saw their numbers reduced to just a fraction of what they once were.

Indigenous People

The Native Americans in all regions of the North American continent depended on fur for their daily existence. Deer, fox, wolf, bear, beaver, otter, and porcupine were all animals sought for their fur along the Appalachians. Further west on the Great Plains, the American bison, or buffalo as it is commonly called, supplied all the needs of the people of the plains and the Rocky Mountains.

When the populations of the indigenous people began to wane, the numbers of the animals they hunted and trapped began to grow quickly.

Europeans Arrive

French explorers began the fur trade in the early 1500s in Newfoundland, Canada, and southward into present-day Maine. They began exchanging furs with the native people of the area for knives, mirrors, cloth, and cast iron skillets. The skillets were heated, dropped in ice-cold water, and shattered by the natives, breaking them into razor-sharp pieces that they then used for files to shape into spear points, arrowheads, and knives.

Gradually these early arrivals to New France became known as coureur des bois: “runners of the woods.” They were independent trappers who often lived with Native American tribes, took Native American wives, and became permanent fixtures among the indigenous peoples. Modern towns named Dubois or DuBois in Wyoming, Indiana, Idaho, and Pennsylvania are vestiges of these men.

Their primary trade was in otter, mink, marten, fox, wolf, and ermine pelts in the early days of the trade.

Why Were Beaver Pelts So Valuable?

Owners, middlemen, exporters, and importers became rich on the efforts of the trappers and their Native American allies as the demand for fur expanded. In the 1630s, the market for beaver pelts began to grow. Fashionable Parisians began wearing the “shako” and other varieties of beaver top hats.

As the decades passed, the demand for fashionable beaver top hats grew. The independent trappers, the company men, and the tribes that traded with them began to notice the increase in price they were getting from buyers.

The Beaver Wars

The demand for fur was so strong that the Iroquois Confederation, an English ally, went to war with their traditional rivals, the French aligned Algonquin in what was known as the Beaver Wars. With a lucrative market and dwindling local beaver populations, the Iroquois moved west into Ohio in search of beaver and sparked a war in the process.

The Beaver Wars were more of series of isolated battles than a declared conflict, but it lasted until the late 17^th century.

European Expansion of the Fur Trade

In the vastness of the American Great Plains, two French brothers led an expedition into territory never before seen by Europeans in 1742-43. The Verendrye brothers were the sons of a French fur trapper working around Lake Superior. They traveled west, eventually descending as far as the Wind River Valley in central Wyoming, discovering rich areas of beaver activity in the process.

In Canada, trade between French trappers, traders, and the Cree, the predominant trading tribe north of the American border grew with both sides prospering from the exchange. Peaceful relations were the hallmark of the fur trade in the cold northwest regions of North America. French trappers and traders often married Native Canadian women, and their children carried on the tradition. Some earning the title of “Courier Du Bois” a name that bestowed honor on the man who had earned this moniker. It meant he was one with the wilderness, able to live off the land, stand on his own with European and Native people. These were the men who forged the unique relationship Canadians had that was vastly different than the treatment Native Americans received in an endless series of lies and broken treaties by the American government.

The reception wasn’t so friendly in the regions that eventually became part of the United States.  Those early alliances between the French and the Algonquin Federation, and the English and the Iroquois League.

European conflicts between the French and English quickly spread across the Atlantic to the American colonies. Raiding parties of Iroquois and Algonquin were paid and encouraged by their English and French allies to attack the other side mercilessly.

The practice of scalping was unknown in North America until the arrival of the rival French and English trappers and traders. In an effort to kill off the competition, the Europeans began paying bounties for enemies killed by Native Americans.

They sometimes kept necklaces of trigger fingers to prove they had killed the enemy or placed ears on a ring, but the best method was a blond, brunette, or redhead scalp. This clearly European scalp proved the person killed wasn’t another Native American being passed off as a French or English victim for the reward money.

The lucrative trade in scalps augmented an already flourishing fur trade in beaver, otter, mink, muskrat, and wolf pelts.

When the United States gained its independence at the Treaty of Ghent in 1783, the demand for beaver had already decimated the beaver population in New England.  A treaty with Great Britain, along with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, opened the Northwest Territory to American settlement and the beaver industry boomed in the tributaries and small lakes surrounding the Great Lakes.

Solitary trappers worked the vastness of the Canadian and American Great Lakes region for almost a century before organized fur companies began to form.

The two most famous were the Hudson Bay Company, a French venture operating at first in Canada and then descending into the southern Great Lakes and as far west as Montana. The other was the “Astorians” a company created by German immigrant John Jacob Astor. By 1800, Astor was a wealthy man, profiting $250,000 from beaver pelts alone, a figure equivalent to $6,000,000 today.

New Beaver Rich Territory

Explorers like Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike found vast populations of fur-bearing animals on their quests, along with mountain men like Jim Bridger, and Jedediah Smith.

As Lewis and Clark headed north, then west up the Missouri, they were amazed by the amount of wildlife they encountered on their continental journey.  There was a huge grizzly bear population that created problems for the explorers, but what they were astounded with was the vastness of the bison herds and the heavy concentration of beavers on every stream flowing into the Missouri.

Their legendary guide Sacajawea knew the territory well, and it was an encounter with her Shoshone family that opened the Rockies to increased trapping. Early solitary trappers and mountain men knew of the richness of beaver across modern Wyoming and Idaho, but they tried to keep this a secret.

That all changed, however, when Lewis and Clark returned. Ironically, it was a beaver, or perhaps a family of beaver, that saved one of Lewis and Clark’s expedition from death. John Colter, who was  member of Lewis and Clark’s expedition, broke away from the expedition north of Yellowstone. He was captured by the Blackfeet, a particularly aggressive tribe.

Colter was allowed a form of “trial by combat” in being allowed a head start across the sagebrush as a group of young warriors waiting a few minutes, then began pursuit.

Colter overpowered the first man to catch him, then dived into a backwater created by a beaver dam on one of the tributaries of the Yellowstone River. Colter swam underwater, found the entrance to the beaver den, and hid inside until his pursuers moved on in search of him. Colter became known as the first mountain man and his tales of geysers, mud pots, waterfalls, and the beauty of Yellowstone revealed the wealth of the region to fur traders.

When news of the new beaver-rich territory reached the east, individual fur traders set out from St. Louis, Missouri in search of furs. In the early days, these fur traders often took Native American wives in their journey to the West. After trapping and curing beaver pelts for several seasons, they eventually made the trip back to St. Louis to sell the furs they had accumulated.

The Fur Trade Rendezvous

The distance, danger, and effort involved made it challenging for fur traders to sustain their business. In 1825, one fur trader named William Ashley met with mountain men gathered by Jedediah Smith on the Henry’s Fork River in Wyoming for the first fur trading rendezvous.

Traders brought gunpowder, cloth, medicine, muskets, lead, and whiskey to the trappers. In exchange for fur, the trappers resupplied without ever having to leave their areas. News of the rendezvous spread across the Rocky Mountains and a year later an even larger fur trading rendezvous was held in Cache Valley, Utah.

The rendezvous was a riotous affair, lasting on average three weeks each summer, with drunken trappers breaking their isolation, rival tribes declaring truces while they traded and enjoyed the action and traders raking in profits. A popular drink named “Taos Lightning” came in barrels from Santa Fe. The potent concoction was 80% grain alcohol, with jalapeno pepper juice, tobacco juice spit into the mix on the way for color, and sometimes fruit for a bit of flavor.

Riverton, Wyoming was the site of one of the largest fur trading rendezvous in 1838, but Pinedale, Wyoming held the most, with a total of six rendezvous, making Wyoming the center of the Western fur trade. The location of central Wyoming, an area reach in beaver, fox, wolf, bear, and otter, was situated close enough to St. Louis and Santa Fe for traders to reach either on the Missouri drainage or overland.

Decline of the Fur Trade

While the fur trade continued in the United States and Canada until the 1850s, it had become a declining business as early as the 1820s. As fur trappers moved further West to the Great Lakes, then on to the Rocky Mountains, they devastated the beaver population.

Trappers worked larger areas with diminishing results as one of the first man-made extinctions of North American mammals took place. In a precursor of modern trends, the demand for beaver pelts, which eventually became the very trendy beaver hats also began to fail.

It was a last second whim of human fancy that saved the beaver, and it was the product of another creature, the silk moth that saved these vital members of the Aquarian ecosystem from total eradication.

Silk hats began to take the fashion stage from the old stovepipe style beaver headgear. Chinese markets opened up further to European and American trade in the early 19th century. Some Americans made a fortune by importing silk that were woven by Chinese laborers in factories across the sprawling country.

Sailing vessels made the journey from London, Madrid, and Boston with increasing speed. Trade routes across the Suez via camel caravan connected ships sailing across the Indian Ocean to waiting partners in the Mediterranean for the final leg to European markets, or on to the growing American economy.

In the midst of all this international trade, the beaver slowly recovered. Without constant predation by trappers, and with a demand that ended almost overnight, beavers gradually return to pre-trapping populations in the upper reaches of the Missouri and Mississippi, in the Rocky Mountains, and around the Great Lakes.