In spite of the fact that necessity for cooperation prevented any deliberate attempts to destroy the Indians and their cultures by hostile reactions, their traditional ways were transformed nonetheless. The fur trade favoured economic specialization. Significantly for Western Canada, this occurred before extensive European settlement began. Therefore, out of economic necessity, the Indians agreed to settle on reserves with the promise that the government would look after their welfare and help them make yet another adjustment to changing economic conditions.
Such a sad result would not have been predictable when Alberta Natives first began to trade with Europeans since their initial involvement was indirect.
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As various areas in eastern Canada became overtrapped, Native intermediaries searched for furs in areas further west and north. By the early eighteenth century, furs that Alberta-based Natives traded with intermediaries had become part of the international fur-trading industry. But Alberta Natives had yet to encounter any Europeans; according to archaeologist Trevor Peck, the European goods that Plains peoples acquired before their direct contact with Europeans, including guns, were simply made use of alongside their traditional goods in ways that had minimal impact on their existing cultural practices.
By the mids, both the French fur traders, headquartered in Montreal, and the English, based in York Factory on Hudson Bay, were attempting to establish relations with Natives in the West so as to reduce the role of the intermediaries in the trade and thus increase their potential profits. Accompanied by Cree guides, he came west in the hope of establishing relations with the Blackfoot and to encourage them to bring furs to York Factory or other HBC forts.
The Natives were largely indifferent to his efforts since having more European goods hardly seemed worth the risk of lengthy treacherous voyages, a view generally shared by all Alberta Native communities. But after the British defeated the French in the Seven Years War and the French ceded control of Canada to the British, Anglo-American fur traders who settled in Montreal, in alliance with Anglo-American traders on the frontier, began establishing fur-trading posts throughout the West, including what is today Alberta.
Native groups for whom a visit to a fur-trading post was only days away down river were generally happy to become part of the trade. While the Blackfoot continued for some time to reject any role as trappers, they proved quite willing to prepare and sell pemmican — dried buffalo meat seasoned with berries — to the traders who lacked their own sources of food. The ability of Native peoples in the interior to trade with the Montreal-based firms forced the HBC , which was enraged that Britain would not enforce the monopoly granted to the company in over the western trade, to also establish western posts.
The result was not only a series of competing posts, often close together, across the West, but also frequent violence between HBC and NWC traders. Fort Chipewyan followed in In total, about sixty forts were built in Alberta between and Confederation in , though some only lasted a few years. The presence of fur-trading posts in their region gave an incentive to large numbers of Alberta Native communities to participate in the fur trade.
History - Fur traders
By the s, even the Blackfoot, once so reluctant to trade with the Europeans, brought wolf and fox skins to trading posts on the northern fringe of their hunting territories. Even after the merger, Natives traded with American free traders when they could not get better prices from the Canadian monopoly fur-trading company. The change from a subsistence to a trading economy impacted all of the First Nations, though throughout the years of the fur trade, they were social actors, not victims like Natives elsewhere in the Americas who had become slaves or landless and confined to small reserves.
The Alberta First Nations retained many of their core beliefs. Even when smallpox, diphtheria, and other diseases killed thousands at a time, they continued to have faith in the medicine of their traditional healers.
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But a bigger threat to maintaining buffalo herds arose in the s when industrialists discovered that buffalo hides provided excellent belts for power-transmission systems. Initially, the Native peoples who took part in the trade participated mainly as independent providers of furs or pemmican, or as middlemen. The NWC used primarily French-Canadian voyageurs, following in the footsteps of the French companies that had been forced out of the fur trade after France was routed from Canada.
In , the company employed about fifteen hundred French-Canadians, mainly as seasonal contract workers. When they felt that instead their supervisors had been cruel and stupid, they occasionally revolted, often as individuals but sometimes collectively. Some forms of protest involved working slowly or inefficiently, deliberately mistranslating what their master was trying to convey to a Native or vice versa, or, if there seemed few alternatives, deserting their master, though that violated the terms of their contract.
In turn, masters often responded with intimidation and threats, and the withholding of alcohol and feasts. Occasionally, despite the tight job market, a company would fire a worker. The NWC , for example, faced with a strike in Rainy Lake in , managed to persuade a number of the workers to return to work. The company then promptly fired the strike leaders. The Orkneymen of the HBC collectively demanded higher wages in , and the company, following accepted capitalist principles of the period, fired the instigators and replaced them with another group of workers.
While the fur trade may have been a partnership of Europeans and Natives, there was never any doubt in the minds of the whites in charge of the HBC about who should rule the roost. The company, as reorganized in , had a clear social class structure, which, in turn, was based on race and gender. At the apex of the company was the governor appointed by the leading shareholders in Britain. Then came the chief factors, who supervised trade districts, and beneath them, the chief traders, who ran the main trading posts. These individuals were incorporated into the company as partners and received, between them, 40 percent of company profits, with the non-working investors receiving the remaining profits.
From to , chief factors earned average profits of pounds a year while the chief traders earned pounds. Clerks, who earned salaries of about pounds a year, were next in the hierarchy, followed by assistant clerks earning half that amount. No First Nations person was ever appointed to a position of clerk or higher. Only a few mixed-bloods with influential fathers broke the racial barrier.
In , none of the 25 chief factors of the company were individuals known to have Native blood, while only two chief traders of 28 and 16 clerks of were mixed-blood. From the earliest days of interaction between European fur traders and Native peoples, some of the former lived among the latter and, to a degree, adopted their ways.
Many European men chose to live with or marry Native women.
For Native women, the decision to live with a European man was fraught with dangers, including abandonment. But to some, it offered the opportunity to live a somewhat easier, sedentary life with more material goods. Though the HBC , during its first century, attempted to prevent its servants from having intercourse with Native women and having mixed-race families, the NWC recognized early on that such marriages cemented the bonds between the company and particular Native communities.
By the time Alberta Natives were drawn into the fur trade, marriages of European-origin traders and Native women were the rule rather than the exception. Until the churches had established themselves firmly in western Canada, such marriages followed Native customary practices. Provincial Archives of Alberta, B In short, a hardening of racial lines occurred as the fur trade became more established, and those lines became even more rigid as the fur trade gave way to agricultural and urban settlements. The offspring of marriages of European men and Native women sometimes found a home in the First Nations societies of their mothers, and a few integrated themselves, with many difficulties, into the European societies of their fathers.
Many, however, viewed themselves as a distinct people because they had ties as individuals to two very different social groups. While they contracted their labour to the fur-trading companies, the limited careers that the companies offered them encouraged them to remain freelancers, copying the Plains Natives in filling many of their subsistence needs with the buffalo. The jury recommended clemency and the judge, concerned about potential violence, imposed no sentence. The other three prisoners were released without a trial. Bungi , the mix of English, Gaelic, and Cree spoken by this group of mixed-bloods, marked them off from other groups.
We have already noted the significant unpaid contributions of Native wives to the functioning of trading posts and the trade more broadly. Foreshadowing the future of capitalism in Alberta from that time to the present day, only a small group of workers, almost exclusively white, had any job security.
Clerks and surgeons, and a small group of tradespeople had contracts of three to five years, which were often renewed; this provided guaranteed wages for set periods. But boatmen, guides, interpreters, and canoe builders, who over time were increasingly mainly Native, had only seasonal contracts and could be barred from future contracts if they proved militant.
That did not always prevent militancy, however. While wages were at issue, more important demands were that the company provide sturdier, easier-to-navigate boats, along with smaller loads and better food on the boats. The boatmen were tired of dealing with dangerous currents in worn-out, overloaded boats. The company, unwilling to yield to such demands but aware that it could not easily replace its Native workforce, gradually switched to steam-powered boats to reduce the number of transport workers required.
The HBC view of western Canada was shared by the Fathers of Confederation, mainly capitalists in Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic colonies who viewed the Canada that they created as a potential commercial giant. They wanted it to follow the US model in which the original states in the east captured lands further west from Natives and Mexicans alike and turned them into successful commercial farming areas that became the market for the goods produced by eastern manufacturers.
In this model, traditional Native societies based on hunting, trapping, and fishing stood in the way of social progress. Bones were gathered then loaded onto railroad cars and shipped to factories in the east. There, the bones were ground and used in refining sugar or for fertilizer. In , the HBC ceded political control over the lands that it had been granted by Britain one year short of two centuries earlier.
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The Government of Canada paid the company , pounds about 1. Though the federal government negotiated with representatives of the provisional government at Red River, led by Louis Riel, and agreed on paper to many of their demands, it subsequently sent a twelve-hundred-man military expedition to take control of the new province of Manitoba until a provincial government was elected. The leader was Colonel Garnet Wolseley, who had already achieved some colonial notoriety for putting down an uprising in India and who would subsequently play similar roles against opponents of British imperialism in southern Africa and Egypt.
This inspired many other explorers and traders to come to Wisconsin. Missionaries also came to Wisconsin to introduce and convert Indians to Christianity. French explorers first heard the name "Wisconsin" in a conversation with one of the Indian tribes.
Fur Trade Era: 1650s to 1850s | Short History of Wisconsin | Wisconsin Historical Society
Historians have puzzled over its meaning for years, but the most authoritative study of the name concluded that it probably meant "River of Red Stone. The missionaries' quest for souls and the traders' for furs brought white explorers into Wisconsin. Their motives were quite different, and though they worked closely at times, as when Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette and fur trader Louis Joliet teamed up to explore the Mississippi , the devotees of God and those of wealth gained from furs were destined for conflict.
By the early s, missionary work proved no match for the financial rewards of the fur trade. The Jesuits, who opposed the excesses of the fur trade, were expelled, and French soldiers, who guarded the lucrative Wisconsin trade routes, held power until late in the century. Watercolor painted by Peter Rindisbacher in View the original source document: WHI From to , Wisconsin's economy revolved around fur in the way that today's economy revolves around oil. Because fur is waterproof, beaver skins could be pressed into felt for hats that kept people both warm and dry.
From Moscow to Rome, the demand for beaver hats remained immense for more than years. Anyone who could supply beaver pelts to cities in Europe could grow rich. Merchants shipped anything that Indians would buy and then demanded beaver skins in return. Trade goods included metal knives, awls and kettles, steel flints for starting fires, guns and ammunition, alcohol which, though officially prohibited, was steadily supplied through the black market , woolen blankets, and porcelain beads for jewelry. Goods were shipped to regional warehouses in Michilimackinac present-day Mackinac, Michigan, at the head of Lake Michigan , and then redistributed to smaller outposts such as Green Bay, Prairie du Chien and La Pointe.
Created by Reinier and Joshua Ottens. In autumn, traders would advance guns, ammunition and other supplies to Indian hunters, who would return in the spring to settle their accounts with beaver — a system that kept most Indians permanently in debt to French traders.
The traders would pack large canoes with thousands of pounds of pelts for the annual trip to Montreal. Beavers caught near present-day Milwaukee or Minocqua soon graced the heads of customers in Paris or London. By the s a chain of French trading posts arced across the interior from Montreal through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River past St. Louis to New Orleans. Troops stationed at these posts made sure that trade goods came in and beaver pelts went out with as little trouble as possible.
Wisconsin sat directly in the center of this arc, and was a major conduit for the wealth of the Mississippi Valley to flow toward Quebec. It was the interstate highway of the 17th and 18th centuries. Antigo, Wisconsin. Created June 1, The interior fur trade was so profitable that the English tried to lure Indian suppliers away from the French.