Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America PDF full book. Access full book title Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America by Eric Jay Dolin. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494
Get Book Here
Book Description
A Seattle Times selection for one of Best Non-Fiction Books of 2010 Winner of the New England Historial Association's 2010 James P. Hanlan Award Winner of the Outdoor Writers Association of America 2011 Excellence in Craft Award, Book Division, First Place "A compelling and well-annotated tale of greed, slaughter and geopolitics." —Los Angeles Times As Henry Hudson sailed up the broad river that would one day bear his name, he grew concerned that his Dutch patrons would be disappointed in his failure to find the fabled route to the Orient. What became immediately apparent, however, from the Indians clad in deer skins and "good furs" was that Hudson had discovered something just as tantalizing. The news of Hudson's 1609 voyage to America ignited a fierce competition to lay claim to this uncharted continent, teeming with untapped natural resources. The result was the creation of an American fur trade, which fostered economic rivalries and fueled wars among the European powers, and later between the United States and Great Britain, as North America became a battleground for colonization and imperial aspirations. In Fur, Fortune, and Empire, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade of old, when the rallying cry was "get the furs while they last." Beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were slaughtered, used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. To read Fur, Fortune, and Empire then is to understand how North America was explored, exploited, and settled, while its native Indians were alternately enriched and exploited by the trade. As Dolin demonstrates, fur, both an economic elixir and an agent of destruction, became inextricably linked to many key events in American history, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, as well as to the relentless pull of Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West. This work provides an international cast beyond the scope of any Hollywood epic, including Thomas Morton, the rabble-rouser who infuriated the Pilgrims by trading guns with the Indians; British explorer Captain James Cook, whose discovery in the Pacific Northwest helped launch America's China trade; Thomas Jefferson who dreamed of expanding the fur trade beyond the Mississippi; America's first multimillionaire John Jacob Astor, who built a fortune on a foundation of fur; and intrepid mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith, who sliced their way through an awe inspiring and unforgiving landscape, leaving behind a mythic legacy still resonates today. Concluding with the virtual extinction of the buffalo in the late 1800s, Fur, Fortune, and Empire is an epic history that brings to vivid life three hundred years of the American experience, conclusively demonstrating that the fur trade played a seminal role in creating the nation we are today.
Author: Eric Jay Dolin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494
Get Book Here
Book Description
A Seattle Times selection for one of Best Non-Fiction Books of 2010 Winner of the New England Historial Association's 2010 James P. Hanlan Award Winner of the Outdoor Writers Association of America 2011 Excellence in Craft Award, Book Division, First Place "A compelling and well-annotated tale of greed, slaughter and geopolitics." —Los Angeles Times As Henry Hudson sailed up the broad river that would one day bear his name, he grew concerned that his Dutch patrons would be disappointed in his failure to find the fabled route to the Orient. What became immediately apparent, however, from the Indians clad in deer skins and "good furs" was that Hudson had discovered something just as tantalizing. The news of Hudson's 1609 voyage to America ignited a fierce competition to lay claim to this uncharted continent, teeming with untapped natural resources. The result was the creation of an American fur trade, which fostered economic rivalries and fueled wars among the European powers, and later between the United States and Great Britain, as North America became a battleground for colonization and imperial aspirations. In Fur, Fortune, and Empire, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade of old, when the rallying cry was "get the furs while they last." Beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were slaughtered, used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. To read Fur, Fortune, and Empire then is to understand how North America was explored, exploited, and settled, while its native Indians were alternately enriched and exploited by the trade. As Dolin demonstrates, fur, both an economic elixir and an agent of destruction, became inextricably linked to many key events in American history, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, as well as to the relentless pull of Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West. This work provides an international cast beyond the scope of any Hollywood epic, including Thomas Morton, the rabble-rouser who infuriated the Pilgrims by trading guns with the Indians; British explorer Captain James Cook, whose discovery in the Pacific Northwest helped launch America's China trade; Thomas Jefferson who dreamed of expanding the fur trade beyond the Mississippi; America's first multimillionaire John Jacob Astor, who built a fortune on a foundation of fur; and intrepid mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith, who sliced their way through an awe inspiring and unforgiving landscape, leaving behind a mythic legacy still resonates today. Concluding with the virtual extinction of the buffalo in the late 1800s, Fur, Fortune, and Empire is an epic history that brings to vivid life three hundred years of the American experience, conclusively demonstrating that the fur trade played a seminal role in creating the nation we are today.
Author: Sylvia Van Kirk
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806118475
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Get Book Here
Book Description
Beginning with the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, the fur trade dominated the development of the Canadian west. Although detailed accounts of the fur-trade era have appeared, until recently the rich social history has been ignored. In this book, the fur trade is examined not simply as an economic activity but as a social and cultural complex that was to survive for nearly two centuries. The author traces the development of a mutual dependency between Indian and European traders at the economic level that evolved into a significant cultural exchange as well. Marriages of fur traders to Indian women created bonds that helped advance trade relations. As a result of these "many tender ties," there emerged a unique society derived from both Indian and European culture.
Author: Richard S. Mackie
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774842466
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447
Get Book Here
Book Description
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the North West and Hudson�s Bay companies extended their operations beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. There they encountered a mild and forgiving climate and abundant natural resources and, with the aid of Native traders, branched out into farming, fishing, logging, and mining. Following its merger with the North West Company in 1821, the Hudson�s Bay Company set up its headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the lower Columbia River. From there, the company dominated much of the non-Native economy, sending out goods to markets in Hawaii, Sitka, and San Francisco. Trading Beyond the Mountains looks at the years of exploration between 1793 and 1843 leading to the commercial development of the Pacific coast and the Cordilleran interior of western North America. Mackie examines the first stages of economic diversification in this fur trade region and its transformation into a dynamic and distinctive regional economy. He also documents the Hudson�s Bay Company�s employment of Native slaves and labourers in the North West coast region.
Author: Lloyd Keith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780874223361
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
In an era of grand risk, fur moguls vied to command Northwest and China markets, gambling lives and capital on the price of beaver pelts, purchases of ships and trade goods, international commerce laws, and the effects of war.
Author: Susan Sleeper-Smith
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803243293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Lucrative, far-reaching, and complex, the fur trade bound together Europeans and Native peoples of North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rethinking the Fur Trade offers a nuanced look at the broad range of contracts that characterized the fur trade, a phenomenon that has often been oversimplified and misrepresented. These essays show how the role of Native Americans was far more instrumental in the conduct and outcome of the fur trade than previously suggested. Rethinking the Fur Trade exposes what has been called the “invisible hand of indigenous commerce,” revealing how it changed European interaction with Indians, influenced what was produced to serve the interests of Indian customers, and led to important cultural innovations. The initial essays explain the working mechanisms of the fur trade and explore how and why it evolved in a North Atlantic context. The second section examines indigenous perspectives through primary-source writings from the period and considers newly evolving indigenous perspectives about the fur trade. The final sections analyze the social history of the fur trade, the profound effect of the cloth trade on Indian dress and culture, and the significance of gender, kinship, and community in the workings of economic exchange.
Author: Daniel Robert Laxer
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228009812
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Get Book Here
Book Description
As fur traders were driven across northern North America by economic motivations, the landscape over which they plied their trade was punctuated by sound: shouting, singing, dancing, gunpowder, rattles, jingles, drums, fiddles, and – very occasionally – bagpipes. Fur trade interactions were, in a word, noisy. Daniel Laxer unearths traces of music, performance, and other intangible cultural phenomena long since silenced, allowing us to hear the fur trade for the first time. Listening to the Fur Trade uses the written record, oral history, and material culture to reveal histories of sound and music in an era before sound recording. The trading post was a noisy nexus, populated by a polyglot crowd of highly mobile people from different national, linguistic, religious, cultural, and class backgrounds. They found ways to interact every time they met, and facilitating material interests and survival went beyond the simple exchange of goods. Trust and good relations often entailed gift-giving: reciprocity was performed with dances, songs, and firearm salutes. Indigenous protocols of ceremony and treaty-making were widely adopted by fur traders, who supplied materials and technologies that sometimes changed how these ceremonies sounded. Within trading companies, masters and servants were on opposite ends of the social ladder but shared songs in the canoes and lively dances during the long winters at the trading posts. While the fur trade was propelled by economic and political interests, Listening to the Fur Trade uncovers the songs and ceremonies of First Nations people, the paddling songs of the voyageurs, and the fiddle music and step-dancing at the trading posts that provided its pulse.
Author: David J. Wishart
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Get Book Here
Book Description
"In stressing the exploitation and destruction of the physical and human environment rather than the usual frontier romanticism, David Wishart has provided for students of the trans-Mississippi fur trade a valuable service."--Journal of the Early Republic. A standard reference work [that] should be required reading for all students of the American west."--Pacific Historical Review. "The whole [fur trade] system is traced out from the Green River rendezvous or the Fort Union post to the trading houses of St. Louis and the auctions in New York and Europe. Such factors as capital formation, shifting commercial institutions, the role of advanced market information, and the nature, kinds, costs, and speed of transportation are all worked into the story, as is the relationship of the whole fur trade to national and international business cycles. This is an impressive achievement for a book so brief. . . . [It] opens out onto new methodological vistas and paradigms in western history."--William H. Goetzmann, New Mexico Historical Review David J. Wishart is a professor of geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize for distin-guished books in American geography, sponsored by the Association of American Geographers for An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians, also available from the University of Nebraska Press.
Author: John Francis Grant
Publisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 1772124133
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468
Get Book Here
Book Description
Born in 1833 at Fort Edmonton, Johnny Grant experienced and wrote about many historical events in the Canada-US northwest, and died within sight of the same fort in 1907. Grant was not only a fur trader; he was instrumental in early ranching efforts in Montana and played a pivotal role in the Riel Resistance of 1869-70. Published in its entirety for the first time, Grant's memoir-with a perceptive introduction by Gerhard Ens-is an indispensable primary source for the shelves of fur trade and Métis historians.
Author: Arthur J. Ray
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802079800
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Get Book Here
Book Description
A classic study of the Assiniboine and western Cree Indians who inhabited southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan between 1660 and 1870. The second edition contains a new preface and an update on all sources.
Author: David Goodman Mandelbaum
Publisher: University of Regina Press
ISBN: 9780889770133
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428
Get Book Here
Book Description
Based on the author's thesis. Part I was previously published in 1940 by the American Museum of Natural History. This revised edition includes two additional comparative sections.
