Who is reliant on fur

These bundles often weighed as much as 90 kilograms. This heavy weight was held in place by a strap or tumpline around their heads. They often carried their boats and heavy packs for several kilometres through tangled underbrush, over slippery rocks and through clouds of blackflies. These events test the strength, accuracy and endurance of the participants. The bison hunts took on an increased importance as demand for bison robes and hides — the leather was used to make industrial belts — became more prominent from the s until the great herds of bison began disappearing in the s.

Many sons of HBC traders also became fur trade employees, serving in a variety of positions such as clerks, postmen and factors. Search Search. Go Back. Many garments, especially those of the wealthy, were trimmed with the fur of animals such as fox, ermine, and sable. Europeans learned that beaver fur could be made into felt and fashioned into high hats, which soon became fashionable throughout the continent.

Beavers were almost extinct in Europe but were plentiful in North America and possessed high-quality pelts. The first Europeans to purchase furs from Indians were French and English fishermen who, during the s, fished off the coast of northeastern Canada and occasionally traded with the Indians.

In exchange, the Indians received European-manufactured goods such as guns, metal cooking utensils, and cloth. This trade became so lucrative that many fishermen abandoned fishing and made voyages to North America only to trade in furs, often before great explorers such as Cartier, Giovanni Caboto John Cabot , Henry Hudson, Giovanni da Verrazzano, and even Christopher Columbus made their famous voyages. While Cartier's voyages did not result in lasting French settlement in North America, they did expand trade between the French and Indians which had been going on before he arrived.

Throughout the s, French traders regularly landed their ships at Tadoussac near the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Saguenay Rivers and traded with Canadian Indians. Many tribes then traded some of these goods with other Indian groups farther into the interior. No Frenchmen resided in Canada at this time, nor were there other European settlements along the northeast coast of North America. The traders simply came to trade and then went back to Europe.

Of lesser prominence were the English colonies of New England settled by the Puritans and Pilgrims beginning in the s. Unlike the French and Dutch, the English came to farm rather than trade, but occasionally traded with local Indians as well.

The French, on the other hand, traded with the Algonkian-speaking tribes of the St. By the s, many areas used by the Iroquois for gathering furs became exhausted. They initiated a series of wars that did not end until , although there were long periods of relative peace during this year period. Some of the fiercest fighting took place in the late s and early s.

The combined forces of the League of the Iroquois destroyed some tribes such as the Erie and scattered others such as the Huron with the goal of monopolizing the Great Lakes fur trade and receiving more trade goods from the Dutch and English.

In the course of these wars, many tribes such as the Potawatomi, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Sauk, and Fox were pushed from southern Michigan into Wisconsin. The Iroquois wars were particularly destructive, and many refugee Indians who fled into Wisconsin suffered from starvation and warfare with the two indigenous tribes, the Menominee and Ho-Chunk.

The Iroquois wars disrupted the flow of furs to the French colony of Quebec. Prior to the wars, the Huron had controlled the trade into the interior of North America, including Wisconsin.

The level of trade the Hurons had into the Wisconsin area is unknown, but French sources suggest that the Huron and Ottawa both traded with Wisconsin Indians before any Europeans arrived. Jean Nicolet might have been the first European to arrive in Wisconsin, but he came as a French emissary rather than as a trader. He was followed 20 years later in by two traders, most likely Medart Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers, and his brother-in-law Pierre-Esprit Radisson.

The two men made other voyages as well, and these initiated a period of almost constant contact between French traders and Wisconsin Indians. The government of New France strictly controlled who could and could not venture into the upper Great Lakes region to trade.

Indeed, after coming back from one of their journeys, Groseilliers and Radisson were admonished by the governor-general of the colony for leaving without his permission.

Few Frenchmen were given such permission because the French wanted the Indians to bring the furs into the posts instead. The principal trading center in Wisconsin after was the Ottawa village at Chequamegon Bay on the southern shore of Lake Superior. After the destruction of the Huron by the Iroquois, the Ottawa became middlemen in the French fur trade.

Great flotillas of canoes would leave Chequamegon Bay with furs and arrive at Montreal in Canada. There the Ottawa received European goods which they took back to Wisconsin and traded for furs with other tribes. The French, by contrast, moved into the interior, directly trading with the Indians who harvested the furs.

The French arrangement was more conducive to expansion, and by the end of the seventeenth century, they had moved beyond the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers into the western Great Lakes region see Figure 1. Later they established posts in the heart of the Hudson Bay hinterland. In addition, the French explored the river systems to the south, setting up a post at the mouth of the Mississippi.

The English takeover of New France at the end of the French and Indian Wars in did not, at first, fundamentally change the structure of the trade. Rather, French management was replaced by Scottish and English merchants operating in Montreal. But, within a decade, the Montreal trade was reorganized into partnerships between merchants in Montreal and traders who wintered in the interior. Over the next decades treaties were signed with many of the northern tribes forever changing the old fur trade order in Canada.

During the eighteenth century, the changing technology of felt production and the growing demand for felt hats were met by attempts to increase the supply of furs, especially the supply of beaver pelts.

Any permanent increase, however, was ultimately dependent on the animal resource base. How that base changed over time must be a matter of speculation since no animal counts exist from that period; nevertheless, the evidence we do have points to a scenario in which over-harvesting, at least in some years, gave rise to serious depletion of the beaver and possibly other animals such as marten that were also being traded.

Why the beaver were over-harvested was closely related to the prices Natives were receiving, but important as well was the nature of Native property rights to the resource. That beaver populations along the Eastern seaboard regions of North America were depleted as the fur trade advanced is widely accepted.

In fact the search for new sources of supply further west, including the region of Hudson Bay, has been attributed in part to dwindling beaver stocks in areas where the fur trade had been long established. From there is an uninterrupted annual series of fur returns at Fort Albany; the fur returns from York Factory begin in see Figure 1.

The beaver returns at Fort Albany and York Factory for the period to are described in Figure 2. At Fort Albany the number of beaver skins over the period to averaged roughly 19,, with wide year-to-year fluctuations; the range was about 15, to 30, After and until the late s average returns declined by about 5, skins, and remained within the somewhat narrower range of roughly 10, to 20, skins. The period of relative stability was broken in the final years of the s. In and , returns increased to an average of nearly 23, Following these unusually strong years, the trade fell precipitously so that in fewer than 6, beaver pelts were received.

There was a brief recovery in the early s but by the end decade trade had fallen below even the mids levels. In , Fort Albany took in just 3, beaver pelts. This pattern — unusually large returns in the late s and low returns thereafter — indicates that the beaver in the Fort Albany region were being seriously depleted. The beaver returns at York Factory from to , also described in Figure 2, have some of the key features of the Fort Albany data.

After some low returns early on from to , the number of beaver pelts increased to an average of 35, There were extraordinary returns in and , when the average was 55, skins, but beaver receipts then stabilized at about 31, over the remainder of the decade. The first break in the pattern came in the early s shortly after the French established several trading posts in the area. Indeed, the return of 38, skins was the largest since the French had established any posts in the region.

The returns in were also strong, but after that year the trade in beaver pelts began a decline that continued through to Average returns over the rest of the decade were 25,; the average during the s was 18,, and just 15, in the s. The pattern of beaver returns at York Factory — high returns in the early s followed by a large decline — strongly suggests that, as in the Fort Albany hinterland, the beaver population had been greatly reduced.

The overall carrying capacity of any region, or the size of the animal stock, depends on the nature of the terrain and the underlying biological determinants such as birth and death rates. The population dynamics of the species exploited depends on the harvest each period:. The choice of parameter a and maximum population X is central to the population estimates and have been based largely on estimates from the beaver ecology literature and Ontario provincial field reports of beaver densities Carlos and Lewis, Simulations based on equation 2 suggest that, until the s, beaver populations remained at levels roughly consistent with maximum sustained yield management, sometimes referred to as the biological optimum.

But after the s there was a decline in beaver stocks to about half the maximum sustained yield levels. The cause of the depletion was closely related to what was happening in Europe.

There, buoyant demand for felt hats and dwindling local fur supplies resulted in much higher prices for beaver pelts. Figure 3 reports a price index for furs at Fort Albany and at York Factory. The index represents a measure of what Natives received in European goods for their furs. After that year, prices continued to rise.

The pattern at York Factory was similar. Although prices were high in the early years when the post was being established, beginning in the price settled down to about Prices then continued to increase.

It was these higher fur prices that led to over-harvesting and, ultimately, a decline in beaver stocks. An increase in price paid to Native hunters did not have to lead to a decline in the animal stocks, because Indians could have chosen to limit their harvesting.

Why they did not was closely related their system of property rights. One can classify property rights along a spectrum with, at one end, open access, where anyone can hunt or fish, and at the other, complete private property, where a sole owner has full control over the resource. Between, there are a range of property rights regimes with access controlled by a community or a government, and where individual members of the group do not necessarily have private property rights.

Open access creates a situation where there is less incentive to conserve, because animals not harvested by a particular hunter will be available to other hunters in the future.

Thus the closer is a system to open access the more likely it is that the resource will be depleted. Across aboriginal societies in North America, one finds a range of property rights regimes. Native Americans did have a concept of trespass and of property, but individual and family rights to resources were not absolute. Why a social norm such as gift-giving or the related Good Samaritan principle emerged was due to the nature of the aboriginal environment.

The primary objective of aboriginal societies was survival. Hunting was risky, and so rules were put in place that would reduce the risk of starvation. As Berkes et al. These norms, however, also reduced the incentive to conserve the beaver and other animals that were part of the fur trade. The combination of these norms and the increasing price paid to Native traders led to the large harvests in the s and ultimately depletion of the animal stock.

Indians were the primary agents in the North American commercial fur trade. It was they who hunted the animals, and transported and traded the pelts or skins to European intermediaries. The exchange was a voluntary. In return for their furs, Indians obtained both access to an iron technology to improve production and access to a wide range of new consumer goods. It is important to recognize, however, that although the European goods were new to aboriginals, the concept of exchange was not.

The archaeological evidence indicates an extensive trade between Native tribes in the north and south of North America prior to European contact. As is evident from the table, the commercial trade was more than in beads and baubles or even guns and alcohol; rather Native traders were receiving a wide range of products that improved their ability to meet their subsistence requirements and allowed them to raise their living standards. The items have been grouped by use. The producer goods category was dominated by firearms, including guns, shot and powder, but also includes knives, awls and twine.

The Natives traded for guns of different lengths. The 3-foot gun was used mainly for waterfowl and in heavily forested areas where game could be shot at close range. The 4-foot gun was more accurate and suitable for open spaces. In addition, the 4-foot gun could play a role in warfare.

These goods probably became necessities to the Natives who adopted them. We have much less information about the French trade. The French are reported to have exchanged similar items, although given their higher transport costs, both the furs received and the goods traded tended to be higher in value relative to weight. The Europeans, it might be noted, supplied no food to the trade in the eighteenth century. In fact, Indians helped provision the posts with fish and fowl.

The price of a prime beaver pelt was 1 made beaver , and every other type of fur and good was assigned a price based on that unit. For example, a marten a type of mink was a made beaver , a blanket was 7 made beaver , a gallon of brandy, 4 made beaver , and a yard of cloth, 3? These were the official prices at York Factory. Thus Indians, who traded at these prices, received, for example, a gallon of brandy for four prime beaver pelts, two yards of cloth for seven beaver pelts, and a blanket for 21 marten pelts.

The actual rates, however, depended on market conditions in Europe and, most importantly, the extent of French competition in Canada.