Furs and Deerskins in Eastern North America

European maritime contact with the New World thrust commercialized human predation across the North Atlantic Ocean. Commercial hunting proved to be the most lucrative way to exploit the northernmost regions of the Americas. Much of the early impetus for maritime travel to North America came from the profits to be made from hunting, killing, processing, and shipping animal skins back to Europe. Europeans found several prey species—beavers, foxes, marten, and other furbearers, and deer—that yielded high-value commodities for the home market with its pent-up demand for fur. Windfall exploitation of abundant New World fur-bearing animals raised the European standard of living.

By the early sixteenth century, supplies of furs were dwindling across Europe and prices had risen sharply. The European beaver, for example, was nearly extinct in southern Europe and fast disappearing elsewhere. Even rabbit skins were hard to get and were expensive. Sable and marten, the costliest furs, were prohibitive in price for all save the very few. In England, fashionable taste was shifting away from fur-lined gowns toward "fabrics of an almost unbelievable richness." Nevertheless, cloth did not provide the warmth of fur in the increasingly cold winters. In 1604, a Venetian living in London commented, "The weather is bitterly cold and everyone is in furs although we are almost in July."

Unlike sugar and tobacco, producing furs required no heavy investment in land conversion and cultivation. Peltries demanded only a modest investment in relation to their potential return. The indigenous peoples of North America supplied the human energy and skill needed for the hunt and its aftermath. Successive Indian groups were a cheap, readily available labor force that engaged in ever more arduous labor in return for inexpensive trade goods. If necessary, Indian groups bartered for beaver and other furs from more remote Indians with access to better hunting grounds. European colonists, even fur traders, did very little actual hunting and trapping themselves. Traders, farmers, and artisans saw little appeal in the rigors of the hunt. Somewhat later, by the late seventeenth century and through the eighteenth century, the warmer southern region of North America developed a new export product. Overshadowed by the far better known trade in beaver, fox, and other furs, deerskins became a staple product of the American Southeast. Market demand by the early modern European leather industry soared as domestic supplies of deerskin dwindled. European traders turned to North America, where the most plentiful deer by that time were those in the southern colonies. The indigenous peoples in the American Southeast responded to new market stimuli and became primary producers of semi-processed deer hides in ever increasing numbers.

The territorial reach of the fur trade far exceeded the extent of European settlement and direct contact. Long before any direct trade with Europeans occurred, Indian groups in the interior traded furs for goods brought by Indian middlemen. Some Indian groups became middlemen who acquired fur for trade goods from interior Indian hunters and exchanged them for more trade goods, especially European weaponry, with Europeans. Conflicts over middleman status could and did lead to war and the expulsion of the losers from their territories. In this "protohistoric era" of indirect trade, Indians moved perceptibly toward commercial hunting. Archaeological data confirm that even the Indians of the Canadian subarctic were acquiring and using European trade goods by the end of the seventeenth century. During the "historic era," that followed, European fur traders traveled to Indian settlements and began direct trading relations. As contact intensified, the arrival of other, competing European fur traders generated new pressures to kill and overkill more animals.

THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FUR TRADE

Early-sixteenth-century voyages to engage in North Atlantic cod fishing and whaling put European seamen in frequent contact with Indians along the northern coastline of North America. French, Basque, and Portuguese sailors exchanged gifts with the Micmacs of the Maritime Provinces and the Montagnais groups of southern Labrador. Gift exchanges soon evolved into a trading pattern. The Indians wore and used furs and pelts that had substantial value in European eyes. Beaver, bear, lynx, fox, otter, marten, badger, muskrat, and mink pelts could be conditioned then cut and pieced together to make warm and decorative fur garments. The skins of shorthaired seals, moose, elks, and deer, if properly treated, made exceptionally strong and supple leather garments. The coastal Indians were willing to exchange furs for European manufactured goods.

In these early encounters, the most desirable objects offered to the Indians were iron knives, hatchets, and kettles; wool blankets and other European textiles; and glass beads for decoration. Marten skins, rare and expensive in Europe, were plentiful in New England and could be obtained very cheaply in exchange for axes, knives, and other trade goods.

In the latter part of the century, profits from the casual trade encouraged merchant-adventurers to invest in fur trading rather than fishing or voyages to the New World. In 1583, French merchants in La Rochelle, Saint Malo, and Rouen financed five fur-trading voyages to North America. Two years later, ten ships made the crossing. One Stephen Bellinger, a trader from Rouen, "brought home ... divers beastes skynnes as beavers, otters, martense, lucernes, seals, buff, dere, skynnes. All drest and paynted on the innter side with divers excellent colors."

The eastern Algonkian Indians—Micmacs and Montagnais among others—living along the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and in Nova Scotia were involved in low-intensity fur trading throughout most of the sixteenth century. These Algonkian-speaking hunters had recently driven the horticultural Iroquois out of the Saint Lawrence River valley in a conflict over control of the growing fur trade. The Montagnais became the dominant middlemen, or trading specialists, who extracted furs from hunters in the interior in the Saguenay River drainage system in exchange for trade goods. The Montagnais in turn supplied those Spanish, Basque, Dutch, and French trading vessels that sailed up the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as far as Tadoussac, an Indian trading center located where the Saguenay River enters the Saint Lawrence.

In the last half of the sixteenth century, a new, intense European demand for beaver pelts stimulated fur trading in the New World. Molded and shaped hats made of felt from the inner fur of the beaver became popular for higher-status men in the late 1500s in western Europe and remained in fashion throughout the early modern period. The North American beaver became the most valuable furbearer of the New World and prey to one of the longest sustained hunts for a single species in world history. Demand...