The British allied with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. A battle occurred in between the French and their First Nations allies, on one side, and the Haudenosaunee on the other. This conflict grew into wars by the s. They formally ended in with the Great Peace of Montreal.
They travelled inland and traded with Indigenous peoples. Coureurs des bois were unlicensed traders from New France. A voyageur was like a coureur des bois. The main difference between them is that a voyageur had a license from the government to trade. Voyageurs appeared in the s when the government introduced these licenses.
Traders and explorers often relied on the knowledge of Indigenous guides. Many of the coureurs des bois and voyageurs married Indigenous women. They did so mainly to establish good trading relations. Britain became the master of the fur trade in North America after it took control of New France in the s. The NWC was founded in Both companies expanded westward.
The process required first that the beaver wool be separated from the guard hairs and the skin, and that some of the wool have open barbs, since felt required some open-barbed wool in the mixture. Felt dates back to the nomads of Central Asia, who are said to have invented the process of felting and made their tents from this light but durable material. Although the art of felting disappeared from much of western Europe during the first millennium, felt-making survived in Russia, Sweden, and Asia Minor.
As a result of the Medieval Crusades, felting was reintroduced through the Mediterranean into France Crean, In Russia, the felting industry was based on the European beaver castor fiber. Given their long tradition of working with beaver pelts, the Russians had perfected the art of combing out the short barbed hairs from among the longer guard hairs, a technology that they safeguarded.
As a consequence, the early felting trades in England and France had to rely on beaver wool imported from Russia, although they also used domestic supplies of wool from other animals, such rabbit, sheep and goat. But by the end of the seventeenth century, Russian supplies were drying up, reflecting the serious depletion of the European beaver population.
Coincident with the decline in European beaver stocks was the emergence of a North American trade. North American beaver castor canadensis was imported through agents in the English, French and Dutch colonies. Although many of the pelts were shipped to Russia for initial processing, the growth of the beaver market in England and France led to the development of local technologies, and more knowledge of the art of combing.
Separating the beaver wool from the felt was only the first step in the felting process. It was also necessary that some of the barbs on the short hairs be raised or open. On the animal these hairs were naturally covered with keratin to prevent the barbs from opening, thus to make felt, the keratin had to be stripped from at least some of the hairs.
The process was difficult to refine and entailed considerable experimentation by felt-makers. Although such processes removed the keratin, they did so at the price of a lower quality wool. The opening of the North American trade not only increased the supply of skins for the felting industry, it also provided a subset of skins whose guard hairs had already been removed and the keratin broken down.
Beaver pelts imported from North America were classified as either parchment beaver castor sec — dry beaver , or coat beaver castor gras — greasy beaver. Parchment beaver were from freshly caught animals, whose skins were simply dried before being presented for trade. Coat beaver were skins that had been worn by the Indians for a year or more. With wear, the guard hairs fell out and the pelt became oily and more pliable.
In addition, the keratin covering the shorter hairs broke down. By the middle of the seventeenth century, hatters and felt-makers came to learn that parchment and coat beaver could be combined to produce a strong, smooth, pliable, top-quality waterproof material. Until the s, beaver felt was produced with relatively fixed proportions of coat and parchment skins, which led to periodic shortages of one or the other type of pelt. The constraint was relaxed when carotting was developed, a chemical process by which parchment skins were transformed into a type of coat beaver.
The original carrotting formula consisted of salts of mercury diluted in nitric acid, which was brushed on the pelts. The use of mercury was a big advance, but it also had serious health consequences for hatters and felters, who were forced to breathe the mercury vapor for extended periods. From to , before the carotting process had become established, coat beaver generally fetched a higher price than parchment beaver, averaging 6.
Once carotting was widely used, however, the prices were reversed, and from to parchment exceeded coat in almost every year. The same general pattern is seen in the Paris data, although there the reversal was delayed, suggesting slower diffusion in France of the carotting technology.
As Crean , p. A weighted average of parchment and coat prices in London reveals three episodes. From to prices were quite stable, fluctuating within the narrow band of 5. During the period, to , prices moved sharply higher and remained in the range of 7 to 9 shillings. The years to saw another big increase to over 12 shillings per pelt. There are far fewer prices available for Paris, but we do know that in the period to the trend was also sharply higher with prices more than doubling.
Weights are based on the trade in these types of furs at Fort Albany. Prices of the individual types of pelts are not available for the years, to King also included a second category, caps of all sorts, for which he estimated consumption at 1. This means that as early as , the potential market for hats in England alone was nearly 5 million per year.
Over the next century, the rising demand for beaver pelts was a result of a number factors including population growth, a greater export market, a shift toward beaver hats from hats made of other materials, and a shift from caps to hats. The British export data indicate that demand for beaver hats was growing not just in England, but in Europe as well. In a modest 69, beaver hats were exported from England and almost the same number of felt hats; but by , slightly over , beaver hats and , felt halts were shipped from English ports Lawson, , app.
In total, over the seventy years to , 21 million beaver and felt hats were exported from England. In addition to the final product, England exported the raw material, beaver pelts. The hats and the pelts tended to go to different parts of Europe. Raw pelts were shipped mainly to northern Europe, including Germany, Flanders, Holland and Russia; whereas hats went to the southern European markets of Spain and Portugal.
By the eighteenth century, the demand for furs in Europe was being met mainly by exports from North America with intermediaries playing an essential role. The American trade, which moved along the main water systems, was organized largely through chartered companies. It operated through the St. Lawrence River and in the region of the eastern Great Lakes. The structure of the English company allowed for more control from the London head office, but required systems that could monitor the managers of the trading posts Carlos and Nicholas, The leasing and licensing arrangements of the French made monitoring unnecessary, but led to a system where the center had little influence over the conduct of the trade.
The French and English were distinguished as well by how they interacted with the Natives. 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. By the s, almost every Indian man in the Great Lakes region owned a musket or rifle, and Indian women relied almost exclusively on metal cooking kettles and other utensils.
Most Indians wore clothes made of European-woven wool and cotton cloth rather than leather or fur. The fur trade also affected how the Indians conducted their seasonal rounds. In summer, they lived in large, semi-permanent villages that often consisted of several hundred people.
In these villages, they fished, gathered, and grew crops for food. In the winter, these villages would split up into small hunting bands. As the fur trade grew more important, the Indians began their winter hunts earlier, focused on hunting animals that produced valuable pelts such as beavers and muskrats, and went farther away from their villages. For example, the Menominee near Green Bay regularly went to Minnesota to conduct their winter hunts.
The British phase of the fur trade ended in The earlier provision in Jay's Treaty that allowed Canadian traders to live and work in the Midwest was not included in the new treaty, and Congress quickly passed laws that forbade anyone who was not a U. Traders at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien had to apply for citizenship if they wanted to ply their trade, and the vast majority did so.
British companies in Canada were no longer allowed to send goods to these traders or buy their furs. The company's owner, John Jacob Astor, known to be a fierce competitor, attempted to crush other trading companies that got in his way. Despite his efforts, Astor never gained a complete monopoly over the trade; too many other Americans opposed him.
However, Astor's company did manage to gain control of the majority of the trade in the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi valley.
The fur trade in these areas continued until the s, but in many ways it was a declining business as early as the s. Beaver had become over-hunted by the by the s, and by the s the species was nearly extinct in southern Wisconsin.
Some species such as muskrat, deer, and marten remained abundant, but prices for these pelts were often low. Moreover, once the government began buying the Indians' land, especially in the s, the Indians had an alternative source of income. Traders still took furs, but during the s and s they made more money selling goods to the Indians in exchange for their annuity money from land sales. In the s, the Indians lived on reservations and could no longer harvest furs in their old hunting grounds.
Many Indians turned to other forms of employment, particularly logging and lumber mills. By , the partners who formed this company had quit the fur trade and moved into other businesses.
A small group of men took over the American Fur Company's operations at Mackinac Island in , but by this concern had also shut down. The Great Lakes fur trade effectively ended that year. The Fur Trade. Trade with Native Americans was so critical to the French and British that many European Americans working in the fur trade adopted Native protocols.
The Ojibwe were particularly influential, which led many French and British people to favor Ojibwe customs of bartering, cooperative diplomacy, meeting in councils, and the use of pipes. After the War of there were three main parties involved in the Upper Mississippi fur trade: Native Americans primarily the Dakota and Ojibwe , the fur trading companies, and the US government. These parties worked together and each had something to gain from a stable trading environment.
Both Fort Snelling and the Indian Agency were established by the US government at the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers to control and maintain the stability of the region's fur trade. By , the American Fur Company controlled the fur trade across much of present-day Minnesota.
Today it is called Mendota, derived from the word Bdote. The post was managed by Alexis Bailly, who began running a series of trading posts that extended up the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. The Dakota and Ojibwe were the primary trappers of fur-bearing animals in the Northwest Territory. They harvested a wide variety of furs beaver being the most valuable in the region's woodlands and waterways. In exchange for these furs, French, British, and US traders provided goods such as blankets, firearms and ammunition, cloth, metal tools, and brass kettles.
The Dakota and Ojibwe had existed for thousands of years using tools made from readily available materials, but by the s trade goods had become a part of daily life for many Native communities. Some Dakota and Ojibwe communities became dependent on trade goods for a certain level of prosperity and efficiency in their everyday lives.
The fur trade had a tremendous effect on Dakota and Ojibwe cultural practices and influenced US-Native economic and political relations in the 19th century, including treaty negotiations.
Voyageurs "travelers" in French were men hired to work for the fur trade companies to transport trade goods throughout the vast territory to rendezvous posts.
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