Heads, Hides and Horns: The Complete Buffalo Book

The Indian, the Fur Trader, and the Buffalo

" . . there was not a single thing in the trader's stock that was not an unnecessary article of luxury to the Indian. " TRADER JAMES WILLARD SCHULTZ L HE FUR TRADERS of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Canada sought to exploit the riches of a remote wilderness, a wilderness crisscrossed with navigable streams that teemed with fur-bearing animals (especially beaver) and populated with natives who saw no "value" in the animal skins they wore, but who could be taught to value them; natives who knew not the luxuries of iron tools, sweetenings, stimulants and alcohol , but who could be taught to value them also. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, French voyageurs canoed up streams, found portages, and mapped the beginnings of a fur empire extending through the Great Lakes to Lake Winnipeg, spurred into exploration by the possible 7S-fold profit in trading with simple Indians: furs that cost two livres in gewgaws in the outback trading room sold for perhaps ISO livres in the Paris Salon. When the beaver near the Great Lakes disappeared , trade moved to north of Lake Winnipeg. Then, as the beaver thinned again, Frenchman La Verendrye and sons set up posts near the Saskatchewan in 1748. Likewise, in 1774, the Hudson's Bay Company, heretofore dependent on Indians traveling to them, moved to the midwestern Saskatchewan prairies, and then, by 1800, to the Athabasca, in sight 86 of the Rockies. To reach these posts both French and English traders depended upon the native voyageurthe French and Indian mixed-blood who spoke the tongues along the way, who knew the customs, who could build the "thin Birch rind Canoe" that stretched "eight fathoms long, and one and a half wide," and could carry "as much as an India Ships Long boat and draws little water, and so light that two men can carry one several miles with ease." These at first carried 2000 pounds of goods and crew but eventually some carried 8000-pound loads. (A big load was a necessity, for often one's license to trade allowed only five canoeloads of goods to go up river.) To compete with the British, the French had established portages and trails northwest from Lake Superior and had provisioned the route as well, keeping pace pretty well with the British. Then the fall of Montreal to the British in 1760 and the 1763 Treaty of Paris gave them control of the streams, made British subjects out of French trader, Indian trapper and their offspring, the French-Canadian voyageur. French buffalo now became English buffalo. Travel to the Saskatchewan and Athabasca Rivers sent men across lands as trackless as the seas crossed by British ships bringing home the riches of the East Indies trade. Sailors' food took up valuable space in The Indian, the Fur Trader, and the Buffalo "Meeting (he Boats and Inland Trains." Harper's Monthly, June [879. Courtesy The Ubrary Compan)' of Philadelphia. 8, Heads, Hides & Honu "Making a Portage," Harper's Monlhl)" June 1879, COllrles), Tiu Ubrary Company of Philadelphia. holds of India boats, space that might otherwise COIlrain pepper or cinnamon; space was even more valuable in Canada's canoes. Dry sea bread did for sailors; what space-saving food might canoeists eat? How might canoes paddle upstream into the wilderness, gunnel deep by weight of beads, knives and rum, then drift home again alm05t awash with baled fu rs, and yet carry food for the many paddlers! The French had already shown how. In the country west of Lake Winnipeg, the)' had traveled through immense buffalo herds; consequently they had eaten better than at home. Montreal entrepreneurs, discovering that voyageurs, trappers and clerks worked happily when fed cheaply on buffalo meat, had begun trading with the natives for pemmican and other buffa lo provisions as well as furs. Their voyageurs working west of L1ke Winnipeg fed on fresh buffalo meat and pemmican; east of the lake worked the "porkeaters ," those voyageurs who fed on cargo-saving dried corn mixed with buffalo or hog fat. Because of such 88 food, canoe loads comprised eighty percent trading goods: sixty packages of merchandise at ninety to one hundred pounds, provisions to one thousand pounds and eight crewmen with allowable baggage of forty pounds each.I The French had shipped pemmican ro forts along the way to feed men en route. But they had shipped it SO haphazardly that the eastern voyageur sometimes ate rich...