This entry is a subtopic of Fur Trade.
Between 1500 and 1789 the trade in North American furs and hides was profitable in western Europe for various people: furriers, hatters, and leather workers; makers of ornaments, tools, and firearms; distillers; investors and financiers; and governments of nation-states. Medieval Europe had met its own demand for furs until the supply of suitable animals was exhausted and buyers resorted to common pelts such as rabbit or expensive furs from the East. And in the rising nation-states the demand for leather, particularly by standing armies, outgrew the supply of hides from domestic markets.
From modest beginnings the North American trade developed by 1650 into a large-scale business. Native traders wanted ornaments and European clothing, metal tools for a variety of purposes, and firearms for hunting and warfare. For them trade was an exchange of gifts, and even when they demanded more European goods for their furs, their purpose was not to amass capital. Europeans therefore could buy furs relatively cheaply and sell them dearly, unless the supply of furs outran demand. Financiers invested in acquiring and shipping goods fashioned and assembled in Europe by small-scale entrepreneurs and bartered for furs with Native North Americans through individual traders, small companies, or large monopolies licensed by nationstates.
In the north France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain were most actively involved. There was a great demand for marten, muskrat, mink, otter, wolf, bear, and lynx, but the best-known fur was beaver. It was preferred for making the felt hat that, in varying styles, was immensely popular throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Saint Lawrence Valley a series of French monopolies, ranging from the Company of One Hundred Associates (1628–1629 and 1632–1664) to the Company of the Indies (founded 1719), were obliged to accept at a fixed price all the marketable pelts brought to them by French traders. These traders ventured from their base at Montreal by way of the Great Lakes–Saint Lawrence drainage basin first to that of the Mississippi and subsequently across the Canadian Prairies almost to the foothills of the Rockies. The Netherlands West India Company (chartered 1621), based in the Hudson Valley, competed with them until 1660 and was succeeded by English entrepreneurs. The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), an English monopoly founded in 1670, set up posts at the mouths of rivers flowing into Hudson and James Bays in Canada. As French traders penetrated those regions, American Indians could either travel to the HBC posts for English goods or deal with coureurs de bois ('woods runners') or voyageurs from Montreal, who brought them French goods until 1763 and British goods thereafter. Although British entrepreneurs after 1763 competed as briskly with the HBC as the French had, they were forced by the size and efficiency of the HBC to cooperate with one another until by 1787, after a series of smaller mergers, they were consolidated into the North West Company.
After 1713 the French converted the fur trade from an economic purpose into the means to a strategic end. Their chain of fortified trading posts from New Orleans to Montreal, intended to bar the western expansion of the British seaboard colonies, brought them into conflict with British traders not only from New York but also from Georgia to Pennsylvania, where entrepreneurs undertook to harvest and market the hides of deer, elk (wapiti), bison, and moose. By 1680 in Virginia and the Carolinas the deerskin trade had developed from Tidewater beginnings into lucrative enterprises featuring long packhorse trains carrying goods across the Appalachians and returning with hides. After 1720, even when Britain and France were at peace, their commercial rivalry engendered continuous, devastating warfare between their respective American Indian client nations.
Traders from New Spain (Mexico) had dealt in deerskins and buffalo hides as early as 1580 in New Mexico, appropriating trade that had been carried on among aboriginal nations and developing it into a thriving business from 1600 until at least 1780. On the Pacific Coast, in California after 1750 Spanish Franciscan friars developed a prosperous trade in hides. Russian traders, whom the Spaniards regarded as competitors, sent home from the Aleutians and Alaska enormous quantities of furs, especially sea otter.
It would nevertheless be inaccurate to believe that any European country depended on the fur trade as its economic mainstay. Notwithstanding the large volume of trade in North American furs and hides, national economies benefited much more from other fields. In the North the cod fishery thrived on a steady demand; in the South slave labor harvested such lucrative products as sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and indigo. In comparison with those commodities, furs and hides represented an insignificant fraction of the entire trade.
Bibliography
Eccles, W. J. The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760. Rev. ed. Albuquerque, 1983.
Rich, E. E. The Hudson's Bay Company, 1670–1870. 3 vols. Vols. 1–2. New York, 1960.
Robinson, W. Stitt. The Southern Colonial Frontier, 1607– 1763. Albuquerque, 1979.
—FREDERICK J. THORPE
