Demythologizing the fur trade: the living standards of Cree trappers in the 18th century were more European than we think.

Demythologizing the fur trade: the living standards of Cree trappers in the 18th century were more European than we think. Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and the European FurTrade Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis University of Pennsylvania Press 260 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780812242317 THE FUR TRADE HAS LONG BEEN A CLICHE of early Canadian history. Itlodges in our minds as a romantic but slightly tedious haze of canoes,beads and blankets, beaver hats, carefree voyageurs, stolid Scotstraders, untamed Indians and, of course, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For Canada the fur trade might play the role of theWild West in American historical mythology, but, with snow and barterinstead of dust and bullets, it is a myth that has never beentransformed into successful novels or films. Behind the mythology lies the fact that commerce in the fur ofnorthern animals was a major force in shaping the early European historyof the country. It opened Canada to European exploration, in the sameway that oil and mineral resources are today fuelling themetastasization of roads and mining camps across the Arctic. It alsoprovided the context for developing relations between Europeans and theindigenous occupants of northern North America. When alien societiescome into contact, they are fortunate if each possesses a product thatthe other needs or considers to be of value. Such was the case inEastern Canada when 16th-century whalers and fishers encountered FirstPeoples eager to trade animal skins or castoff clothing for iron axes,kettles and knives. This balance of interests laid the basis forcenturies of economic interdependence. In contrast to most colonialsituations--such as that in southeastern North America where Natives hadlittle of value and were simply shoved aside, or in Peru where a surfeitof gold exacted plunder rather than trade--the fur trade created acircumstance that allowed the survival of indigenous culture and thedevelopment of a way of life that flourishes today across the snowforests of Northern Canada. The subtitle of Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and theEuropean Fur Trade, by Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis, should not beunderstood as applying to the full five centuries of the trade acrossall of North America. The authors focus on an important but more limitedsetting, the commerce carried out by the Hudson's Bay Company fromits 18th-century posts along the western shores of the lames and Hudsonbays. These posts attracted Native traders from a vast territorystretching from the upper Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains, southwardas far as the tributaries of the Missouri and northward to those of theMackenzie. Fortunately for scholars of history, most of the transactionsof these traders were entered into the accounts and journals of a singlecommercial enterprise with a penchant for keeping detailed records. Theproblems of managing a distant business from London headquartersrequired a formal reporting structure involving not only account booksbut post journals, annual reports and letters describing the activitiesof both the post servants and their customers. The resulting archives ofthe Hudson's Bay Company comprise what Carlos and Lewis describe as"a window on the structure of aboriginal society and the fureconomy at a time when few Europeans had penetrated inland" As economic historians, Carlos and Lewis focus their attention onthe evidence provided by the account books related to the commerceundertaken at these posts. However, they do not shirk from providinginformation on the social and biological contexts of the trade. At oneend of the subject they present a brief history of the European feltingindustry and of the popularity of the beaver hat. At the other theydiscuss the natural history of the North American beaver, devisesimulation models of beaver populations in the trade area and analyzethe effects of trapping pressure on these populations. Their discussionof indigenous society and culture is brief but competent, and limited tothose of the Cree who formed the great majority of the suppliers tradingat the posts on the west coast of lames Bay. The authors are lessthorough in describing the political context of the trade, limitingtheir interest to the fluctuating intrusion of French trade on the HBCmonopoly as a result of various wars, treaties and politicalmanoeuvrings between the governments of Britain and France.Nevertheless, the book provides a novice in the history of the northernfur trade with most of the information required to understand thecommercial transactions that are at the core of the authors'attention. The major contribution of the book lies in the statistical analysisof these transactions, and it is a contribution that provides valuableinsights on two distinct levels. Most directly, it contributes to anunderstanding of the trade itself, clarifying and correctinglong-ingrained impressions based on less thorough analyses of thenorthern fur trade. For example, the study demonstrates that this was no"beads in exchange for Manhattan" exercise in fleecingignorant yokels. In 1742 Native trappers received 15 to 20 percent ofthe amount for which beaver skins were sold in London, which the authorsconsider a fair price in view of the costs of maintaining HBCestablishments in Canada and England and transporting goods betweenthem. They demonstrate the power held by Native traders in selectinggoods for exchange and the resulting care that the company was forced totake in providing merchandise of good quality. They note the increasedprices paid to those trappers who could play off the HBC traders againstFrench competitors. In this connection, they note that Cree was thelanguage of the commerce, and that the HBC early on began to recruityoung English boys whose ability to become fluent in Cree was basic totheir usefulness as traders and other workers at the company'sposts. Their analysis also clearly demonstrates the rational choices madeby trappers in selecting the goods exchanged for their furs. During theearly 18th century more than 60 percent of the items sold by the HBCwere "producer goods" directly related to making a living:guns and ammunition, axes, ice chisels, twine and fish hooks. About 10percent were "household goods": kettles, blankets, awls andneedles. Another 15 percent were cloth, beads, lace, vermillion andother "household luxuries." Finally, about 10 percent wasspent on tobacco and 5 percent on alcohol. Although the proportion ofluxury goods purchased increased throughout the following decades,neither alcohol nor tobacco exceeded 20 percent of the total trade, and,according to post journals, drunken post employees seem to have posed afar more serious problem than drunken trappers. The authors' statistics also confront a persistent stereotypeof fur trade scholarship, that of "the lazy Indian"--or insocial economic terms, the Native as satisficer who was content to traponly enough beaver to exchange for his basic technological needs, andwho could not be tempted to work harder by paying higher prices. Theynote that much of the evidence for the notion that, in the words of furtrade historian E.E. Rich, "English economic rules did not apply tothe Indian trade" derives from testimony at a 1749 parliamentarycommittee inquiring into the terms of the HBC monopoly. The authors observe that the argument that more competition andhigher prices would not stimulate greater productivity would seem tohave favoured the retention of monopoly conditions, and they notesimilar arguments made at the time with regard to European peasants andmanufacturing labour. The argument is also curiously reminiscent ofcurrent discussions regarding the utility of raising the minimum wage.In contrast to that theory, the statistics presented in this studydemonstrate that trapping effort did respond to increased competitionand higher prices, to the extent that by the mid 18th century beaverwere being trapped at a rate that was well above the maximum sustainableyield. The authors suggest that the old stereotype be replaced by one of"the industrious Indian" a being whose economic interestsoverruled even those of "the ecological Indian," a phraseinvented by anthropologist Shepard Krech to denote the view of NativeNorth Americans as natural conservationists. Carlos and Lewis's simulations of 18th-century beaverpopulations and of the deleterious effects of commercial trappingprovide evidence that suggests the questioning of this more positivestereotype as well. The models and simulations appear realistic to thisreviewer, who has no expertise in the field of wildlife biology, but ifthey were to be questioned there is no doubt that by the 19th centuryovertrapping had devastated beaver populations over large parts of theirrange. The attempt to square this fact with the ecological Indianconcept has provided decades of scholarly debate. The most ingenious andelegantly stated product of this discussion was that of historian CalvinMartin, whose 1978 book Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationshipsin the Fur Trade argued that the beaver were not slaughtered forcommercial gain, but in a war of self-defence against animals that wereascribed spiritual responsibility for the epidemic diseases afflictingNative societies engaged in the fur trade. The thesis, attractive as itmight be to believers in an aboriginal conservation ethic, has beeneffectively demolished by other scholars of the fur trade. The authorsapproach the problem through a reprise of anthropological discussions ofthe Cree system of family or band-owned hunting territories, and notethat the ability to manage the animal resources of family territorieswas subject to prevailing rules of hospitality and generosity. Carlos and Lewis contribute to the destruction of more significantstereotypes through their enlightening comparisons of the economic livesof 18th-century Cree trappers with those of their contemporaries inEngland and other European countries. At one level, these comparisonsare sometimes strained and even absurd. It is clear that the all-meatdiet of the Cree was more nutritious than the diet of the Englishworking class and was closer to that aspired to by the upper classes;indeed, the difference was reflected in the superior stature of theCree. But calculations of the cost of Cree skin clothing designed forsubarctic winters (2.6 [pounds sterling] per family per year) comparedto that paid by the English working classes (1.2 [pounds sterling])tells us little. Similarly, comparisons of the cost of shelter--Creetents and seasonal wooden structures against the permanent houses andtenements of the European working classes--might be more reasonable ifone could factor in the social and health costs of isolation in the bushmeasured against the crowding and poor sanitation of 18th-centuryEuropean towns. At another level, however, these comparisons provide an insightinto aboriginal life that is generally lacking in anthropological orhistorical studies. They show not only that the Cree were roughly equalto the English working classes with regard to material goods, but alsothat the Cree were participating in much the same way in "theeighteenth century consumer revolution." Although Cree consumptionof alcohol and tobacco was much lower than that of their Englishcontemporaries, their increasing use of these commodities mirrored the18th-century English espousal of non-European groceries such as tobacco,tea, sugar and rum. The non-consumable luxuries purchased by theCree--beads, rings, buttons, lace, trunks and mirrors--were the sameitems that appear in probate lists of English and British North Americanhouseholds of the time. Like the industrious workers of Europe, the Creewere acquiring new aesthetic preferences and were satisfying these needsby devoting greater amounts of effort to participating in the emergingglobal economy. This view of North American aboriginals as people who lived in thesame world as Europeans, although at different points along anurban-to-rural continuum, is a perspective that is missing from mostscholarly treatments of the fur trade. Much of aboriginal history iswritten by anthropologists, or by historians with anthropologicaltraining, and tends to treat indigenous societies as so distinctive thatcomparison with western society is either impossible or at leastunproductive. Depriving their subject of a world context, they reinforcethe impression that aboriginal peoples live in a static reality that isseparate from that of the dynamically changing world of globallyoriented cultures. This distortion can be blamed in good part on the training andreward structure of traditional anthropology, and to an even greaterextent on that of the recently emerging discipline of Native studies.Two decades ago anthropologist Roger Keesing wrote an insightful butwidely ignored article rifled "Exotic Readings of CulturalTexts" Keesing argued that, like geographical explorers and travelwriters, anthropologists are rewarded primarily through the discovery ofnew and exotic phenomena. He tells of a colleague who was invited toprepare a paper in honour of anthropological guru Claude Levi-Strauss,and who eagerly set to work analyzing the concept of"direction" as it was perceived by the indigenous people whomhe had studied. But when he eventually realized that their concepts oforientation and the naming of directions was no different from his own,he simply did not bother completing a paper that would attract noattention and likely not get published. The culmination of many suchdecisions must create a significant bias in the perspective of theanthropological discipline, and more importantly in the perspectivethrough which aboriginal people are viewed by the public and by thegovernments under which they live. The work of Carlos and Lewis is effective in correcting this falseimpression. By demonstrating that the 18th-century aboriginal people ofNorthern Canada shared much in common with their Europeancontemporaries, they succeed in portraying the northern fur trade in anew and very useful light. Robert McGhee is an archaeologist who has worked across ArcticCanada and occasionally in other circumpolar regions. His most recentbook is The Thousand-Year Path: The Canada Hall at the Canadian Museumof Civilization (Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2008).