More on Fur, Fortune and Empire

Just a couple more thoughts on Fur, Fortune and Empire.  After writing my previous post and before returning the book to my dad I decided to take a careful read of the footnotes.  I had skipped back to them while reading the book when something caught my attention but I wanted to give them a thorough read. 

Sometimes the footnotes can be more interesting than the actual book or, at least, can provide separate items of interest.  This was the case here. 

As I said before, the scope of this book was different than I expected.  I would have preferred to have read about the actual trading itself but this was really a history of Americans.  In the footnotes he points out the following, which I think is very true:

“One of the difficulties in writing about the American fur trade, especially during the colonial era, is that almost all the historical documents were written by the white people who interacted with the Indians rather than the Indians themselves.  Thus it is nearly impossible to say with certainty what the Indians thought about their participation in the trade, and how they perceived the people with whom they were trading.  Still some documents do exist, and historians have used them, and have also carefully analyzed the broader contemporary literature written by whites, to create portraits of the fur trade, and in particular Indian involvement, that are as accurate and balanced as possible.” (p. 328 fn. 18).

Unfortunately he doesn’t give any specific examples of those historians in that citation.  But I think he’s correct.  They say that history is written by the victors and that’s true. But it’s also true that history tends to be written by those who can write.  The oral tradition of the Indians doesn’t make their histories any less valid than the written histories of the whites with whom they traded but it does make them more difficult to access. 

One of the best quotes in Dolan’s footnotes, though, is from Professor Jennifer Brown, of the University of Winnepeg:  “European records made a big thing of how impressed the Indians were with their trade goods; Indian oral tradition tells the reverse – how impressed the Europeans were with the furs that the Indians didn’t value particularly highly.”  (p. 328 fn 20).

And this sounds true.  It especially sounds true when you know exactly what the colonial traders were trading for. Dolan had some very good sections about the anatomy of the beaver and how beaver skins are used in the making of hats.  The beaver has two types of fur – long coarse outer hairs covering the soft warm inner fur.  Plucking out the outer hairs was time consuming but necessary to get to the fur they wanted.   The most profitable furs were, therefore, furs for which this process had already taken place.  Indians tended to create robes with the fur on the inside and as they wore them the outer hairs would wear away leaving only the soft inner fur.  Fur traders valued these “worn” garments more highly than new unused furs.  I’ve always thought the Indians must have thought the Europeans were slightly crazy to want to buy what the Indians saw (quite rightly) as their smelly used clothes. 

In return for their old clothes and some animal skins, the Indians got mettle goods like kettles. In a later footnote, Dolan quotes historian Ian K. Steele:  “Historians have been irrationally embarrassed by Amerindian economic interests evident in the fur trade of the north and the deerskin trade of the south.  Earlier portrayals of naive Amerindian victims of underpriced furs and overpriced European goods have righty been superseded by more plausible accounts of discerning Amerindian customers able to demand exactly the kind of kettles, blankets, knives, or guns they wanted.” (p. 330 fn. 31).

All of this is to say that some of the things I may have complained about in my post yesterday as lacking were not lacking because Dolan was unaware of them.  Clearly he had his own viewpoint that he was trying to get across and these things were outside the scope of what he was trying to accomplish.  But the footnotes make it clear that he was well aware of these other issues. 

It also is a way of leading up to a quote that he gives in the footnotes from an interview/discussion between Richard White and William Cronan on why the Indians valued kettles:  “Indians wanted kettles partly because you can put them on a fire and boil water and they won’t break.  That’s nice.  But many of those kettles didn’t stay kettles for long.  They got cut up and turned into arrowheads that were then used in the hunt.  Or they got turned into high-status jewelry.  Indians valued kettles because they were such an extraordinarily flexible resource.” 

It’s a great quote but he also gave a a web address for the citation to the quote which took me to an interesting article:  http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1986/5/1986_5_18.shtml

This article is a discussion between Richard White and William Cronan that took place before White published his seminal work The Middle Ground.  In it they talk about the Indian’s use of animals and I was very much reminded of the discussion that took place when I read and blogged about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

R[ichard] W[hite]: What’s hardest for us to understand, I think, is the Indians’ different way of making sense of species and the natural world in general. I’m currently writing about the Indians of the Great Lakes region. Most of them thought of animals as a species of persons. Until you grasp that fact, you can’t really understand the way they treated animals. This is easy to romanticize—it’s easy to turn it into a “my brother the buffalo” sort of thing. But it wasn’t. The Indians killed animals. They often overhunted animals. But when they overhunted, they did so within the context of a moral universe that both they and the animals inhabited. They conceived of animals as having, not rights—that’s the wrong word—but powers. To kill an animal was to be involved in a social relationship with the animal. One thing that has impressed me about Indians I’ve known is their realization that this is a harsh planet, that they survive by the deaths of other creatures. There’s no attempt to gloss over that or romanticize it.

W[illiam C[ronan] There’s a kind of debt implied by killing animals.

RW Yes. You incur an obligation. And even more than the obligation is your sense that those animals have somehow surrendered themselves to you.

WC There’s a gift relationship implied …

RW … which is also a social relationship. This is where it becomes almost impossible to compare Indian environmentalism and modern white environmentalism. You cannot take an American forester or an American wildlife manager and expect him to think that he has a special social relationship with the species he’s working on.

WC Or that he owes the forest some kind of gift in return for the gift of wood he’s taking from it.

RW Exactly. And it seems to me hopeless to try to impose that attitude onto Western culture. We distort Indian reality when we say Indians were conservationists—that’s not what conservation means. We don’t give them full credit for their view, and so we falsify history.

It’s a very interesting interview all around and I encourage everyone to read it.  And as Richard White says: “We can’t copy Indian ways of understanding nature, we’re too different. But studying them throws our own assumptions into starker relief and suggests shortcomings in our relationships with nature that could cost us dearly in the long run.”

Fur, Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, by Eric Jay Dolin

The problem is, I interpreted the title wrong. I thought it was an epic history of the fur trade in America. Yes, I know it says that. But I thought it meant North America. Or at least that it meant the fur trade in parts of North America that later became the United States of America But it really was an epic history of the fur trade in the United States of America with occasional asides about the rest of the fur trade in North America, including parts that later became the United States of America. And, unfortunately, that means that the most fun part of the history of the fur trade in North America was off stage for most of this book.

I knew I was in trouble when it began with the Pilgrims. And while I understand that he was trying to show how the fur trade was an important part of the history of Plymouth Colony, the plain fact of the matter is that Plymouth Colony's fur trade failed fairly quickly (relatively speaking). In fact, most of this book is about the failed history of the American fur trade – at least until old John Jacob Astor decided to buy the entire trade and wipe out the animal population of the west. Which, if you think about it from an environmental perspective, is also a failure.

If you are looking for a thorough history of how the United States and its territorial expansion was affected by the fur trade this is a good place to start. If you are looking for a good history of the North American fur trade, reading this is like wanting to learn about Jazz and starting with a history of Jazz in France. Of necessity a little of the overall history has to be thrown in, but the picture is skewed.

And what is really odd is that the actual mechanics of the trade itself – with the Indians – seem glossed over. I was actually a bit excited that he spent some time talking about the evolution of New Amsterdam because I don’t know as much about New Amsterdam and the Albany trade as I’d like. But then I was disappointed that there wasn’t really much about actual Dutch people trading with actual Indians in it. Just a lot about Dutch people and English and Swedish people fighting over boundaries. The story of the Dutch as they actually traded and their relations with the Five Nations must have been more interesting than as portrayed in this book. Unlike the English in New England, the Dutch were relatively successful in their trade. But they failed as a colony. Reading this book reminded me that history is written by the victors.

And I know the French story was far more interesting than he portrayed it. And although the period I focus on is predominantly the 18th century and not the 19th century, I know that the story of the men involved in John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company was much more interesting than he made it. David Lavender’s biography of Ramsay Crooks, The Fist in the Wilderness, made them come alive for me. I highly recommend that book to anyone who really wants a picture of the trade in the 19th century to see if they are interested in learning more.

The truth is that he tried to put so much into this book that he ended up making it rather dry. The details seem accurate but it tends to plod along. And looking at the footnotes and the bibliography he seems to have relied quite a bit on secondary sources rather than primary sources, which is understandable given the breadth of the topic. But this lacks the spark that quotations from primary sources give.

On the other hand if you need a reference book on the fur trade that goes into a lot of really great detail about the animals being hunted, I think this is an excellent book.