Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and the European Fur Trade

Chapter 5: Industrious Indians

Chapter 5 Industrious Indians [An] improvident and lazy people, having no concern but the subsistence of the present day. —Joseph Robson, Hudson’s Bay Company mason, 1752 H undreds of canoes from communities across the woodlands and plains made their way downriver to Hudson’s Bay Company posts each year. Natives came to take advantage of the opportunity, as James Axtell puts it, to ‘‘acquire new tastes, to form new aesthetic preferences .’’1 But forming and satisfying new preferences, whether for Venetian beads, Brazilian roll tobacco, or other luxury goods, required furs. Each canoe that went down the Nelson or Hayes River to York Factory or down the Albany or Churchill River was packed with skins that included beaver, marten, muskrat, otter, lynx, bobcat, fox, and wolf. A cycle of hunting and trading had, of course, existed prior to the coming of the Europeans and prior to the development of a commercial fur trade. Archaeological remains tell us of a pre-Columbian trading network that stretched the length of the entire continent. Stone, shell, and mineral trade goods have been found hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles from their source. Siliceous stone is the most common trade material found at the archaeological sites.2 Trading, therefore, was not a creation of the contact era. What was new was the range of goods that were now available and the need to purchase these goods with furs. So even though the commercial fur trade can be seen as an extension of activities that had been part of the native economy, the number of pelts traded, as we discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, was far more Industrious Indians 131 than had previously been used for subsistence or trade among native groups. Acquiring furs for the commercial trade meant committing labor to this new sector of the native economy. Where before a native might have spent time as leisure, now his choices included trapping more furs and traveling downriver to the bayside posts to exchange them for European goods. Some native groups chose to participate even more heavily in commercial activity. The ‘‘home guard’’ Indians, for example, eventually lived year-round in the general vicinity of the posts and specialized in providing food. The majority , however, spent a small part of their time in the commercial fur trade, allocating most of their time to traditional activities. The question that we explore in this chapter relates to the supply of labor to the fur trade and, in particular, to what happened to the level of native participation in commercial trapping activity as the prices paid for furs by both English and French increased. Rising fur prices, measured by our fur price index, represent declining prices for the European goods that were purchased with these furs. Rising fur prices also affected the return for time spent in the trade because higher fur prices meant more European goods were received for every hour spent hunting, trapping, and transporting furs. A higher price index thus implied higher prices for furs, lower prices for European goods, and a higher wage to natives for the time they spent in the fur trade. The fur price index can be seen therefore as one indicator of a number of economic factors that were part of the commercial trade. Drawing on his exhaustive study of the Hudson’s Bay Company records, E. E. Rich, the preeminent historian of the company and its records, came to believe that in matters related to their labor supply, Indians behaved differently from Europeans. He wrote: ‘‘English economic rules did not apply to the Indian trade. On the contrary, all who had any knowledge of the trade were convinced that a rise in prices would lead to the Indians bringing down less furs.’’3 This interpretation of native behavior was embraced by economic historian Abraham Rotstein, who was persuaded by Rich’s view of the native reaction to price: ‘‘Indian behaviour in trade was entirely unconventional; they could not be induced to bring more furs (or more of any particular kind of fur) by an offer of higher prices, ie. more European goods.’’4 Both claimed that Indians wanted only a given quantity of goods from the commercial trade, which meant that in a market where fur prices were rising, wants could be satisfied with fewer furs, which 132 Chapter 5 would lead, in turn, to less native effort in commercial activities and fewer...