The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes (Regional Perspectives on Early Ame

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Perry argued that the crucial difference between the Northern Athabaskan peoples living in the sub-arctic vs. By contrast, the absence of waterways flowing into Hudson's Bay the major river in the subarctic, the Mackenzie, flows into the Arctic Ocean forced the Northern Athabaskan peoples to travel by foot with the women as baggage carriers.

In this way, the fur trade empowered Cree and Ojibwa women while reducing the Northern Athabaskan women down to a slave-like existence. The newly formed United States began its own attempts to capitalize on the fur trade, initially with some success. By the s the fur trade had begun a steep decline, and fur was never again the lucrative enterprise it had once been. On the Pacific coast of North America, the fur trade mainly pursued seal and sea otter. Non-Russians extended fur-hunting areas south as far as the Baja California Peninsula. Starting in the midth century, Europeans traded weapons and household goods in exchange for furs with Native Americans in southeast America.

Deerskin was a highly valued commodity due to the deer shortage in Europe, and the British leather industry needed deerskins to produce goods.

Native American—specifically the Creek's—beliefs revolved around respecting the environment. The Creek believed they had a unique relationship with the animals they hunted. Rum was first introduced in the early s as a trading item, and quickly became an inelastic good. Under the influence of rum, the younger generation did not obey the elders of the tribe, and became involved with more skirmishes with other tribes and white settlers. Native Americans had become dependent on manufactured goods such as guns and domesticated animals, and lost much of their traditional practices.

With the new cattle herds roaming the hunting lands, and a greater emphasis on farming due to the invention of the Cotton Gin , Native Americans struggled to maintain their place in the economy. Spanish exploratory parties in the s had violent encounters with the powerful chiefdoms, which led to the decentralization of the indigenous people in the southeast.

As the English and French colonizers ventured into the southeast, the deerskin trade experienced a boom going into the 18th century. At the beginning of the 18th century, more organized violence than in previous decades occurred between the Native Americans involved in the deerskin trade and white settlers, most famously the Yamasee War.

North American fur trade

This uprising of Indians against fur traders almost wiped out the European colonists in the southeast. This competition sprang out of the slave demand in the southeast — tribes would raid each other and sell prisoners into the slave trade of the colonizers. The Yamasees had collected extensive debt in the first decade of the s due to buying manufactured goods on credit from traders, and then not being able to produce enough deerskins to pay the debt later in the year.

After the uprisings, the Native Americans returned to making alliances with the European powers, using political savvy to get the best deals by playing the three nations off each other.

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From their bases in the Great Lakes area, the French steadily pushed their way down the Mississippi river valley to the Gulf of Mexico from onward. Deerskin trade was at its most profitable in the midth century. While both the Cherokee and the Creek were the main trading partners of the British, their relationships with the British were different. The Creeks adapted to the new economic trade system, and managed to hold onto their old social structures.

Charleston and Savannah were the main trading ports for the export of deerskins. The Revolutionary War disrupted the deerskin trade, as the import of British manufactured goods with cut off. The fur trade and its actors has played a certain role in films and popular culture. In contrast to "the huddy buddy narration of Canada as Hudson's country", propagated either in popular culture as well in elitist circles as the Beaver Club, founded in Montreal [82] the often male-centered scholarly description of the fur business does not fully describe the history.

Chantal Nadeau, a communication scientist in Montreal's Concordia University refers to the "country wives" and "country marriages" between Indian women and European trappers [83] and the Filles du Roy [84] of the 18th century. Nadeau says that women have been described as a sort of commodity, "skin for skin", and they were essential to the sustainable prolongation of the fur trade. Nadeau describes fur as an essential, "the fabric" of Canadian symbolism and nationhood.

She notes the controversies around the Canadian seal hunt, with Brigitte Bardot as a leading figure. Bardot, a famous actress, had been a model in the "Legend" campaign of the US mink label Blackglama, for which she posed nude in fur coats. Her involvement in anti-fur campaigns shortly afterward was in response to a request by the noted author Marguerite Yourcenar , who asked Bardot to use her celebrity status to help the anti-sealing movement.

Bardot had successes as an anti-fur activist and changed from sex symbol to the grown-up mama of "white seal babies". Nadeau related this to her later involvement in French right-wing politics. The anti-fur movement in Canada was intertwined with the nation's exploration of history during and after the Quiet Revolution in Quebec , until the roll back of the anti-fur movement in the late s. As men from the old fur trade in the Northeast made the trek west in the early nineteenth century, they sought to recreate the economic system from which they had profited in the Northeast. Marriage and kinship with native women would play an important role in the western fur trade.

White traders who moved west needed to establish themselves in the kinship networks of the tribes, and they often did this by marrying a prominent Indian woman. Fur families often included displaced native women who lived near forts and formed networks among themselves. These networks helped to create kinship between tribes which benefitted the traders. Catholics tried their best to validate these unions through marriages.

But missionaries and priests often had trouble categorizing the women, especially when establishing tribal identity. These men were mostly of a mixed race identity, largely Iroquois, as well as other tribes from the Ohio country. Many of them settled on the Missouri River and married into the tribes there before setting up their trade networks.

By the s, the fur trade had expanded into the Rocky Mountains where American and British interests begin to compete for control of the lucrative trade. Through their efforts they helped to create a new order centered on the trading posts. By the s Canadians and Americans were venturing into the West to secure a new fur supply. After the demand for bison robes began to rise gradually, although the beaver still remained the primary trade item. The s saw a rise in the bison trade as the beaver trade begin to decline.

In this region they would establish several prominent fur trading communities. These communities had ties to one another through the NWC. In addition, they sold pemmican at the posts. By contrast, the local Indians had a more diverse resource base and were less dependent on Americans and Europeans at this time. By the s the fur trade had expanded across the Great Plains, and the bison robe trade began to decline.

Traders, trappers, and hunters all depended on the bison to sustain their way of life. For instance, they often used two wheel carts made from local materials, which meant that they were more mobile than Indians and thus were not dependent on following seasonal hunting patterns.

The s brought an end to the bison presence in the Red River area. An area of resettlement was the Judith Basin in Montana, which still had a population of bison surviving in the early s. They wanted to take part in treaty negotiations in the s, but they had questionable status with tribes such as the Chippewa. This meant that they had to reestablish their identity and adapt to a new economic world. In , the global recession hit the fur industry and trappers especially hard with greatly depressed fur prices thanks to a drop in the sale of expensive fur coats and hats.

Such a drop in fur prices reflects trends of previous economic downturns. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. List of French forts in North America. Scottish Indian trade and French and Indian Wars. List of Hudson's Bay Company trading posts. Thirteen Colonies and Canada under British rule — Fur trade in Montana. The Fur Trade in Canada Revised and reprint ed. University of Toronto Press.

Retrieved 5 October The People of Aataenstic: A History of the Huron People to Volume 2 reprint ed. Retrieved 2 Feb The destruction of fur and game animals". Indians in the Fur Trade: Keepers of the Game: First Nations-animal Relationships and the Fur Trade reprint ed. University of California Press. The Journal of Economic History. The Economic History Association. The Origins of the Yamasee War Reconsidered".

Journal of American History. An Environmental History of the Commodification of Animals 1 ed. Review Fernand Braudel Center. The Indian slave trade: North America in the sixteenth century. Native people and European settlers in eastern North America, — Mapping the Mississippian shatter zone: University of Nebraska Press. The Ecological Origins of the Yamassee War of ".

The Creek frontier, University of Oklahoma Press. The expansion of European colonization to the Mississippi Valley, — From the Beaver to Brigitte Bardot. Women in Fur-Trade Society, — King's Daughters and Founding Mothers: The Filles du Roi, A Profile of A People. Children of the Fur Trade: The Forgotten Metis of the Pacific Northwest reprint ed. Oregon State University Press. We Know Who We Are: Metis Identity in a Montana Community. New Faces of the Fur Trade: Michigan State University Press.

Studies in Political Economy. War in the Eighteenth-Century World. Brehaut, Harry Baker The Johns Hopkins University Press. New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Campbell, Marjorie Wilkins The North West Company.

Dolan, Eric Jay Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Red River Trails: Oxcart Routes Between St. Paul and the Selkirk Settlement, Minnesota Historical Society Press. Nute, Grace Lee Perry, Richard Autumn Making the Voyageur World: Richter, Daniel October The Iroquois Experience " ". The William and Mary Quarterly.

Grand Portage as a Trading Post: Retrieved from " https: Pages containing links to subscription-only content All articles with dead external links Articles with dead external links from September All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from March Views Read Edit View history.

In other projects Wikimedia Commons. This page was last edited on 1 September , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Still, Skinner makes admirable sense of it within about two hundred pages by using both American and French historiographies to present a work that accurately summarizes the innovative research of the past two decades on this topic. In The Upper Country Skinner offers a survey that will be of great help to undergraduate students not only in the United States but in Canada as well.

An affordable, lively, well-mapped, and reasonably comprehensive synthesis of events in the upper country on the eve of a war that ultimately determined control of a continent. What Skinner accomplishes in less than two hundred pages is really quite remarkable. The best and most reliable synthesis I have read on the subject yet. Clearly a passionate labor of love, it is a story masterfully told which brings this era and its participants to life again.

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