The Fur Trade and Native Americans

Soon after Europeans made contact with the aboriginal peoples of North America, known as Native Americans, trading became the focus of European concern. French, British, and Dutch merchants sought animal furs, especially beaver skins, which were in high demand between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe for making men's hats. At the same time, Native Americans were superb hunters, but they did not possess metalworking technology as the Europeans did. Native Americans exchanged furs from America's abundant wildlife for iron, copper, and brass goods such as knives, axes, pots, and needles from the Europeans.

Many Native Americans were willing, even enthusiastic, to trade for European goods. Over the centuries, participation in the fur trade increased in volume and in importance in aboriginal economies. The immediate consequence of trade was the addition of material and technological innovations, but dependence on trade had negative effects not foreseen by most participants. Since the market for beaver could not be controlled by Native American fur trappers, they were vulnerable to changes in demand. When demand was high they abandoned some aboriginal practices in order to keep pace. Instead of following traditional conservation principles, they excessively trapped nearby territories so that they could obtain as many animals as possible. This led to the rapid depletion of beaver in some areas. As a result, men were forced to travel farther from their communities to find the desired resource, often entering territories of other people who were similarly engaged in trapping and trading, resulting in conflict. When the demand for furs declined, people were left without the ability to procure the goods that they wanted. In societies where traditional craft skills had been abandoned once people acquired manufactured tools and utensils, the loss of European goods was difficult to adjust to or even contemplate.

In addition to the acquisition of a wide range of imported goods, transformations in aboriginal societies included shifts in economic activities, changes in gender roles, the development of notions of private property in goods and especially in land, the emergence of or increases in social differences based on wealth, and the intensification of warfare caused by competition over access to resources and to trade routes. These transformations were manifested more intensely in some societies than in others, but they were prevalent throughout North America at different historical periods. These changes occurred earliest in regions of initial European entry and settlement, that is, along the eastern coasts and nearby inland territories, but they eventually spread to the interior of the continent, leaving no Native American nation untouched.

As early as the seventeenth century in some eastern aboriginal nations, trapping and trading replaced hunting as men's central productive activities. Among agricultural people where farming was the responsibility of women food supplies were maintained, but among other groups that depended more heavily on meat, fish, and fowl brought in by hunters, aboriginal food resources were not exploited as fully as had been done prior to involvement in the fur trade. Many people then traded with Europeans for food, but this led to increased dependence on traders. Women, too, were involved in the fur trade because their labor was needed to prepare the pelts (animal skins) for the market. Since they also had to provide food for their families and perform household tasks, demands on their labor increased as well. As the economic roles of both men and women changed to place greater focus on the fur trade, people grew more dependent on the trade in order to supply their needs and wants. This reliance on trade tended to intensify and solidify the productive shifts that supported it.

In addition, since European traders dealt with Native American trappers as individuals, a process began that eventually resulted in a reorientation of ideology away from kin-based, community-based mutual reliance and support to one that stressed individuals. Over the centuries, notions of personal private property developed that contrasted fundamentally with beliefs about communal ownership of resources. Although aboriginal societies had concepts of territorial rights, these rights were held by groups, not by individuals. Strangers in need were permitted to use local resources, at least temporarily, but the idea that ownership of land and resources could be transferred was foreign to Native American cultures.