Fur, Fortune, and Empire : : the Epic History of the fur Trade in America

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Furs settle the New World. "As fine a river as can be found" ; The precious beaver ; New Amsterdam rising ; "The Bible and the beaver" -- Clash of empires. Competition, conflict, and chicanery ; "Many hounds are the hare's death" ; Adieu to the French ; Americans oust the British -- America heads West ; "A perfect golden round of profits" ; Up the Missouri ; Astoria ; Mountain men ; Taos trappers and Astor's empire ; Fall of the beaver ; The last robe -- End of an era.
For all of fur's contentious position in American culture today, historian Eric Jay Dolin shows its centrality in our nation's ever-surprising history. He argues that the trade in animal skins turned colonial America into a tumultuous frontier where global powers battled for control. From the seventeenth century right on up to the Gilded Age, the developed world's appetite for fur made the new continent, with its wealth of fur-bearing wildlife, a seemingly inexhaustible resource. The result was a major boost in the evolution of the colonies into a powerful new player on the world stage. Dolin sheds insight on the ways the fur trade created international tensions--in New England, the Great Lakes, and in the expanding West. Fur traders were often the first white men to map major rivers, forests, and mountains, then soon pushed Native Americans off their lands as John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company attempted to monopolize the West.--From publisher description.

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We owe our country to fur submitted by tristana on August 31, 2015, 2:53pm Fascinating and fairly well written book exploring how the fur trade shaped the colonization, exploration, and political development of the USA. The author uses four primary case studies for his thesis: 1) beaver pelt export as the primary economy supporting the colonization of Massachusetts, New York, Delaware, and other parts of the Northeast; 2) sea otters and the exploration and political shuffling of California, Oregon, Washington; 3) beaver trappers as the explorers who first opened up the Rocky Mountains (including the famous rendezvous culture); and 4) bison in the great plains and the railroads.

While I was familiar with the principles of these interactions, I did not appreciate how influential they were for the development of North America. Very interesting history.