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

Epilogue: The Fur Trade and Economic Development

Epilogue The Fur Trade and Economic Development A fter the defeat of the French in the Seven Years’ War, English and Scottish merchants operating out of Montreal replaced the Compagnie des Indes. By 1800 the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Montreal traders had established settlements farther inland, and new sources of beaver supply were opened up as the trade expanded to the Lake Athabasca region and areas farther west.1 For native communities living in the Hudson Bay region the increased fur trading activity only worsened the already fragile state of the animal stocks. Up to the early 1760s natives in the hinterlands of Fort Albany and York Factory had been able to maintain their total returns by shifting from beaver to other animals. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, maintaining this level of trade was no longer possible. Beaver in some regions were near extinction , and the less valuable furs, mainly marten and muskrat, had also been depleted. More serious was what later happened to the large game so essential to the natives’ survival. Early in the nineteenth century, moose and deer were reported to have declined, especially in the more easterly hinterlands of Fort Albany and York Factory, where there was a greater native and European presence.2 Thus natives were faced with a diminishing supply of European goods because of declining populations of beaver and other fur-bearing animals, and they were also being put at risk by the loss of the resources that were the foundation of their traditional economy. Aggravating the problem of a declining resource base were European diseases that through the mid-eighteenth century had largely spared the natives living in the northern and isolated region of Hudson Bay. In 1780–81 a smallpox epidemic reduced populations in the more southerly part of the hinterland, The Fur Trade and Economic Development 185 and there was an epidemic of measles and whooping cough in 1819, although this epidemic was mainly felt farther west.3 The Native Americans’ continued dependence on a renewable natural resource base composed of large game animals and fur-bearers ruled out the long-term economic growth characteristic of modern economies. Native Americans were able to adopt European technology as it became available, and the new methods allowed them to hunt and trap more effectively . Ultimately, though, both the trade in beaver and other furs, and the harvest of large game, were constrained by the rate at which these resources could be replenished. So, despite its initial benefits, the fur trade, by its nature, placed a ceiling on incomes. The size of the animal population was limited, and even the best management could provide only a modest income by nineteenth-century standards. Moreover, once the beaver and other fur-bearers became depleted, even the returns of the mid-eighteenth century could not be sustained. By contrast, technological change in English husbandry and arable farming increased labor productivity just as the introduction of firearms and metal implements had raised the labor productivity of Native Americans . It also meant more agricultural output could be produced on a given amount of land and more land could be brought into production. The increased farm output allowed for population growth and made available a workforce for the growing industrial sector. And the dramatic improvements in manufacturing productivity associated with the Industrial Revolution first in England and then in continental Europe further increased the gap between Europeans and Native Americans.4 The experience of Native Americans was also very different from those Europeans who were colonizing the North American continent. The activities of two New Englanders, John May and Samuel Lane, highlight the contrasting paths. John May, who was born in Massachusetts in 1696, had progressed by the early 1730s from day laborer to ‘‘prosperous farmerartisan ,’’ owning a tannery in addition to his farm.5 In the 1740s, Lane, of Stratham, New Hampshire, also had a tannery as well as a shoemaking business.6 Thus, both men, notably with help of capital from their fathers, were able to start small businesses, each finding a niche in their local communities . Were there such niches in native society? Native trappers prepared the skins and pelts before they were traded to the Hudson’s Bay Company or the French, and the next step would have been combing these pelts to separate out the beaver wool, an activity that might have been 186 Epilogue...