The Life of a Fur Trader in the Old Northwest

Imagine you are navigating a river in your dugout canoe. You have buckskin pants, buckskin moccasins, a cotton hunting shirt and a leather belt. Your are armed with your flintlock rifle and carry a stash of goods that you intend on trading for pelts. The waterway leads to a hunting ground so plentiful that several deer can be killed a day, every day, and turkeys could be considered a pest. You paddle through the silent waterways with the morning stars as your only company. You pass giant trees, herds of sleeping bison and arrive at a small Indian village whos campfires still smolder from last night.

This scene might be picturesque of the American west, but what If I told you this was in Ohio or Illinois? These states, along with the other states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana are known for their corn crops or farms. It wasn't always that way. It was once a different landscape and would have been covered in old growth forests littered with swamp lands, making it a perfect territory to harvest beaver and otter, the choicest pelts in the Great Lakes Fur Trade. The land was full of black bear, panthers, wolves, whitetail deer, turkeys, and even bison. Historian David McCollough notes in his book The Pioneers that game was so abundant that settlers killed a few hundred squirrels a day. The trees were so mature in some areas that they could be measured up to six feet in diameter and one hollowed out black walnut measuring forty one feet in circumference was capable of holding up to six men mounted on horseback. In Wisconsin, flocks of geese were so abundant that it was said a single flock could blacken the sky, and it was not uncommon for traders and hunters to shoot over a dozen deer in a single day. Herds of bison in Wisconsin numbered in the hundreds while a species of eastern elk roamed the entire range from the Mississippi to the Ohio river.

Wild game was not the only thing in abundance but a great number of Algonquin Indian tribes as well, making this less of a wilderness waiting to be found and more of a place already teeming with business affairs and warring civilizations. British and colonials often encountered natives who they regarded as savages because of the uncivilized ways in which they lived. The English saw them as wild as the country in which they inhabited. In journals such as Alexander Henry's, an English trader, the Ottawa and Chippewa celebrated victories in war by consuming their flesh, thinking that it would give them no fear of death in the next fight. Tribes warred with each other over hunting grounds and the trade with the English or French which they heavily relied on. 

It was this type of climate and culture in which the traders found themselves. Often times survival for a trader was not because of his cunning ability or crafty woodsman ship but was because of his ability to make friends with native tribes. George Croghan is possibly the trader that best exemplifies this characteristic while others who hated the tribes often lived a short life. 

Traders often found themselves living with an abundance of resources one minute and then the next minute find themselves with nothing but a buckskin shirt, usually due to being captured by natives. However, at the risk of being mauled by a bear, scalped by Indians, or frozen to death, these traders saw opportunity in the land through the collection and sale of animal hides. In Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West, he talks about how traders would have to obtain a permit from the governing body of the territory, build his canoe from a birch tree, obtain the goods necessary for trading, and then spend months on the water and over land to get to his first trading post. Trading posts were well established by the mid 1700's with some notable ones being Fort Detroit, Fort Michilimackinac, Green Bay, and Sandusky. However, many traders may have even resided with native tribes especially during winter months. It is easy to see what kind of investment an aspiring trader had to make before he even traded his first item for a fur pelt. Not only that but the trader would then have to keep and maintain the hides until he could turn it in for cash. Many traders or trappers of later years never truly "made it" but would constantly live in debt, either because of their own doing or because they were robbed. 

In spite of all this, fur trading was still seen as lucrative. In Steve Rinella's book The Long Hunters, he describes how an enterprising young man could harvest several deer a day, and at that time a deer hide was worth one dollar, coining the term a buck. Many laboring and artisan jobs of the day paid far less than a dollar a day, making trading and trapping look appealing. Rinella also describes that the appealing part may have also rested in the adventure that awaited a "Long Hunter," or in our case a fur trader. For those brave and smart enough, it was a good way to make money... if you weren't mauled, shot, died of hypothermia, or scalped before you could turn in your fortune. 

In the coming weeks and months we will look at people like Charles De Langlade and Alexander Henry, as well as the gear traders carried, methods employed in obtaining furs, and even how a trading fort was captured by natives using a game of lacrosse.