Visiting heads of state are routinely offered gifts. One unusual gift-giving ceremony took place on July 14, 1970, at Lower Fort Garry, the site of an old fur trading post, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Manitoba. In the course of the ceremony, Queen Elizabeth was presented with a quantity of poplar along with a tank holding two live and very frisky beaver. When the Queen “bent over the tank to inspect her new possessions, she turned to the Hudson’s Bay Company governor, Viscount Armory, and asked ‘Whatever are they doing?’ ” In the best diplomatic tradition, the...

As Daniel Defoe suggests, a good felt hat to cover his brains was more than this traveler had known. Was he a servant copying his superiors, or a provincial shifting his dress to conform to the fashions of the city? Or was his bonnet simply worn out after his long journey? We do not know. Yet, by the simple action of changing hats he tapped into a trade that linked Europe with North America and connected English, French, Spanish, and colonial consumers with Native Americans. A “good felt hat” not only linked continents, but it propelled a commercial trade that...

The flow of pelts that transformed the English felting and hatting industries in the late seventeenth century was the result of two fortuitous events. The first was the signing of the Treaty of Breda marking the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War. England, the United Provinces, France, and Denmark signed the treaty in the Dutch city of Breda in July 1667. England had captured New Amsterdam from the Dutch, and as part of their negotiations the English commissioners had offered to return New Netherlands in exchange for Dutch sugar factories on the coast of Surinam. The Dutch declined. And so...

The commercial fur trade of the Hudson Bay region that provided raw materials to the hatting and garment industries of Europe depended for its very existence on the ability of European traders to provide goods that were “pleasing to the Indians.” This phrase not only captures how the London directors of the Hudson’s Bay Company saw the trade; “pleasing to the Indians” epitomizes the roles of the respective parties. The city merchants who came to make up the Court of Assistants or board of directors of the company soon learned that the furs and pelts brought to the bayside posts...

Native Americans paid for kettles, guns, blankets, alcohol, tobacco, cloth, and other European goods with furs, mainly beaver pelts. In Chapter 3 we saw that as the price of furs at the posts rose, native consumers purchased more goods, notably luxury items. What we explore here is the extent to which the increased trade was reflected in the number of beaver pelts delivered to the posts, and how that in turn affected the beaver population. This is an important question because the Hudson Bay Company’s long-term profitability as well as the viability of the trade for native peoples depended on...

Hundreds 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...

The phrases “the earth is part of us” and “the earth is sacred” are powerful and emotive. These extracts from a speech widely believed to have been delivered by Chief Seattle in 1854 as his people were moving off their ancestral homeland were in fact written in the 1970s by Professor Ted Perry of the University of Texas as part of a film script.¹ The producers of the film credited the words to Chief Seattle, and the text came to symbolize how Native Americans and Europeans treat the environment: the first being part of the earth and the other a...

The fur trade gave natives access to goods they could not produce themselves—goods that had a great impact on native life. Now, rather than relying exclusively on implements of stone, bone, and wood, they could substitute guns, knives, ice chisels, kettles, and other metal products. And the European technology embodied in these goods made daily activities easier. Iron kettles, knives, awls, and needles all improved the daily round of women’s work. Cooking was easier in kettles, especially since, as we saw in Chapter 3, women were able to specify the characteristics of the kettles that were sent over, and...

After 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...