How much was a beaver pelt worth?

We know now that the fur trade in North America began in the 1500s with English, and French and Spanish Basque, fishermen off the Atlantic coast. When the fish weren’t enough—or when economies suggested—the fishermen went ashore and took and traded for beaver pelts and other animal hides, and Indian slaves. (That’s how Squanto got to Europe, learned English, and returned to become a translator for the New England colonists.)

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Salmon and Beaver; Politics and Biology

President-elect Trump’s promise to promote coal mining and open more public lands for development of natural gas and oil is not new politics. And the Indian-centered and inspired movement to stop the Dakota Access pipeline is not the first fight by Native Americans against the Euro-American drive to exploit natural resources.

I thought about this as Nez Perce Fisheries workers joined my class (AG 301- ECOSYSTEM SCIENCE OF PACIFIC NW INDIANS) in La Grande last week to talk about salmon and treaties. They explained that the beaver and salmon had developed an intricate symbiotic relationship that had been totally interrupted by the extermination of the beaver almost 200 years ago.

They knew the biology; I could fill them in on the history.

The biology: a series of beaver dams forms perfect habitat for salmon, providing pools for growth and rest, avenues for running up river, and spurts of fast water from the dams’ depths to flush smolts downriver.  Beaver dams also create the hydrology and habitat for flora and fauna on rivers’ extended banks.

The history: One of the peculiar junctures in American history occurred when two countries “jointly occupied” the region the US called the “Oregon Country” and Great Britain’s surrogate, the Hudson’s Bay Company, called the “Columbia District.” The region stretched from the Mexican border (now the California border) far into present-day Canada, and from the Pacific to the Continental Divide. The joint occupation, set originally in 1818 to last ten years, held until an 1846 resolution.

The Americans, hungering for a Northwest Passage and the resources of the region, had sent Lewis and Clark on a reconnaissance exploration in 1804, and in 1811 John Jacob Astor, in consultation with his friend, Thomas Jefferson, had set out to secure a port—Astoria—and establish a foothold for a new state or friendly new country on the Pacific Coast to take advantage of the beaver and otter trade from North America to the rest of the World.

The jockeying for the region went on for some time before Joint Occupancy, with the British Crown’s Hudson’s Bay, the Canadian North West Company, Astor’s American Fur Company, and “free” trappers and traders working the territory, shipping beaver pelts back over the Rockies or around the Horn and eventually on to Europe and Asia. Then there was a war—the War of 1812; The North West Company bought Astor out in 1813. In 1818 the two countries agreed that they would “jointly occupy” the territory. In 1821 Hudson’s Bay absorbed North West, and became the British presence in the region.

The region was, of course, already occupied by Indians of numerous tribes. And the European presence was miniscule—Russian, English, and Spanish ships along the coast, fur trappers and traders inland. But the resources in the territory were tremendous—beaver and otter were the prime targets, but settlement and further exploitation were alive in some eyes. They would come to dominate activities in the Oregon Country until a final resolution was reached in 1846.

The British thought Americans should be held at the Columbia; the Americans lobbied for a boundary further north (Polk’s “54 40’ or fight” election campaign). Hudson’s Bay moved settlers from Red River in Canada to the region and built a fort at Vancouver; the British sent David Douglas to scout the territory and put their stamp on it; American frontiersmen trapped and traded and, eventually guided the missionaries to the Oregon Country.

The real mover and shaker over the middle years of Joint Occupancy was Sir George Simpson, Governor-in-Chief of the Hudson’s Bay Company. From 1820-1860 Simpson was in practice, if not in law, the British viceroy for the most of Canada. The Columbia District was under the direct leadership of John McLoughlin at Fort Vancouver, but Simpson was the law. And his law said:

Strong trapping expeditions should be sent south of the Columbia. These may be called the “Snake River Expeditions.” While we have access we should reap all the advantage we can for ourselves, and leave it in as bad a state as possible for our successors.

Simpson chose Peter Skene Ogden to lead the operation. In less than six years, operating with military precision, Ogden and his men trapped the region bare, from the Upper Columbia and Snake Rivers to California and Nevada. The “scorched earth” policy was ruthless. Mountain men were drowned, murdered, starved, and exhausted. Most of Simpson’s own men died along with the beaver.

The beaver were gone, but the dams carried on for some time, and then, in 1866, the canneries took over. By 1886, 39 canneries took over 43 million pounds out of the Columbia with their very efficient fish wheels. Those wheels stayed in the Big River until the 1930s!

One wonders whether beaver trapping and fish wheels—politics and economics—might have bled the region of salmon if a big dam had never been built.

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It’s the Water

I’ve been following the protest in North Dakota over the pipeline, watching it swell with tribal people from across the country. The New York Times says that members from over 280 tribes are now involved. Some are coming in caravans, some by plane and foot, some Northwesterners made their final miles in large, brilliant canoes.

The Times profiled a few of the protesters. Thayliah Henry-Suppah, Paiute, of Oregon, wearing a traditional wing dress with ribbons and otter furs, said she kept this Indian proverb in mind: “Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It was loaned to you by your children.” In her own words: “We’ve lived without money. We can live without oil, but no human being can live without water.”

Most of the Indians profiled by the Times spoke of water: “We say ‘mni wiconi’: Water is life,” said David Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, the site and center of the protest over a pipeline designed to ship oil out of North Dakota, under the Missouri River. “We can’t put it at risk, not for just us, but everybody downstream.”

It’s easy in this lush Wallowa Valley to take water for granted, although murmurs from California exiles and smoke from miles-away forest fires are troubling. This gathering of Indian peoples should be just as troubling.

It has to do with an attitude that natural resources are basically inexhaustible, and that, even as we run out of one, another resource or another technology will rise to take its place. Indians are telling us that water is the fundamental resource, and that the beaver and salmon that were taken almost to extinction by the fur trade and Columbia River canneries in the 1800s were indicators of a fundamentally flawed economy.

Beaver had been exhausted in Europe when that business marched across the middle of North America from the 1600s into the nineteenth century. In a dispute over the “jointly occupied” Oregon Territory, the British set out to trap out all of the beaver in the Columbia watersheds, thinking that this would dissuade American trappers and immigrants from occupying it. Eventually, silk or some other commodity replaced beaver felt for hats, the crisis was averted, and Americans found other reasons to settle the Northwest.

In the first Alaskan oil rush, American whalers, who had depleted sperm whales in the Pacific Ocean, killed over 13,000 bowhead whales north of the Bearing Strait in just two decades in the mid 1800s. Needless to say, Inupiat culture, which had revolved around whaling for millennia, was severely damaged. Survivors are now rearranging lives around the twenty-first century oil business, adapting while trying to hold onto vestiges of sea culture threatened by oil spills and warming and rising oceans. It’s the water.

Our economy seems based on the consumption of whatever resource is readily available in the moment, trusting that science and capitalist good sense will discover and exploit the next resource. Good we found petroleum to replace whale oil, shale oil to replace crude, wind to replace steam and water generated electricity. And, eventually, we’ll mine the moon, asteroids, and distant planets.

The Indians bring us back, back to land and water. The Umatilla Natural Resource program has developed a presentation on “First Foods.” They argue that ancient longhouse ceremonies served foods in order of importance, and if we do the same we will be healthier and will live in a healtier environment. Clean water, of course, is first, and then salmon—think good spawning grounds, deer, roots, berries, etc.

Our Wallowa waters are the envy of many. And while local cattle ranchers argue that “there is no such thing as a bad rain,” and grass growers and ranchers measure the snowpack and gauge hay cutting and pasture moves against the year’s weather, most of us not making our living in agriculture and timber are blissfully unaware of local water dynamics. We like the look of snowcapped mountains and the rush of  rivers. We fish, or ski, snowmobile, hunt, run rivers, or sit on the beach at Wallowa Lake and enjoy the sun—and water.

A few people work to rectify twentieth century technology by putting meander back in rivers, cooling water and increasing spawning grounds. Some think about our dam—and how sockeye salmon who once flooded the Lake might be brought to it again. Immigrants from California and Central Oregon shake the dust off and water lawns and pastures. And Washington irrigators follow the dam condemnation and potential reconstruction thirstily—they’ll buy that extra water from us.

Indians from diverse cultures across the country camping in North Dakota remind us that water is not just a commodity to be bought and sold, but the fundamental principle of all life.

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Finding Rupert’s Land

Marc Jaffe and I have been editing away on a book of Alvin Josephy’s writings for over a year. Our goal is to let Alvin show readers how Indians are intricately woven into the fabric of American history—they are not a “sideshow”; to explore Alvin’s explorations of Indians and natural resources; and to present a brief forum on the miracle of Indian survival.

The essays—some chapters from books; some magazine articles—are chosen, and introductions to sections by contemporary Indian thinkers who knew Alvin are done. We have a few illustrations, and the intention to use a couple of maps.
One of the essays is “The Hudson’s Bay Company and the American Indian.” Alvin argued that the Company and the fur trade overall had a lot to do with how America and American-Indian relations evolved. Our editor liked this, and thought it would be good to have a map to help people visualize just how extensive the fur trade—and specifically the Hudson’s Bay Company’s holdings and range of influence were.
To refresh briefly, fur was an immediate North American export to Europe. By the early 1600s Europe had decimated its own beaver population in the name of hats and fashion. The Dutch, the English, fishermen working the banks were all sending the occasional load of furs—and Indian slaves, but that is another story—back to the old countries. While tobacco fueled a plantation and export economy in the south, Russian ships were plying the Pacific coast for otter skins and beaver pelts, and some Europeans in today’s Northeast were making trapping and fur trading their primary economic activity. 
And, “By a Royal Charter, granted on May 2, 1670, the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay, became the ‘true and absolute Lordes and Proprietors’ of a vast portion of present-day Canada.” It was all called “Rupert’s Land.”
It was an extraordinary organization, and the movement of trade goods across the country, eventually over the Rockies and on to the Pacific Coast, and the movement of furs the other direction, were monumental. Read about David Thompson’s mapping of the West in Sources of the River, or about John Astor and the attempt to open a sea route and sea port at Astoria to make the movement of goods easier, and American history—and the adventurers, entrepreneurs, Indians and mixed bloods who were involved in the effort—takes on a different flavor. Those missionaries and settlers? Well, they wouldn’t have made it without all of above.
At any rate, in our effort to visualize, we wanted a map. And it turns out not to be so simple. A Canadian named Korsos recently spent a decade or more mapping over 2000 fur posts. Too much detail. Mapmakers show routes, they show forts, and they show boundaries. Sometimes they are guesses years before anyone has explored the territory. Sometimes they are Americans, Canadians, British, French, all jockeying for power and influence.
And things—like most of the fur trade—that end up on the Canadian side of the border don’t make it into our textbooks. And, bless the Canadians, they are not always so interested in what ends up on our side, though they certainly know more about us than we know about them.
But I am left with no good map of Rupert’s Land! Picking and scrabbling, we have found one good map that does much of what we want drawn for Jack Nisbet’s new book on David Douglas, but that mapmaker lives off the grid and is not readily available. And there is an interesting set of historical maps at Canadian Geographic. Check them out at http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/mapping/historical_maps/1825.asp. I couldn’t get through the automated phone business, but I have written. Will keep you posted.

Meanwhile, if you have any ideas on Rupert’s Land, let me know!

Desperation

At the Fishtrap Gathering this weekend, writer Luis Alberto Urrea talked about the border. He’d written a non-fiction book, The Devil’s Highway, about 26 from Vera Cruz who crossed the border in 2001—twelve made it, and fourteen died in the trying. The book was a Pulitzer finalist and has just been reprinted in a tenth anniversary edition. The story is lauded by many, even by border patrollers, but there is no political purchase or acknowledgement.
He’s followed it with a novel called Into the Beautiful North, which deals somewhat playfully with Mexican villages where mass exoduses of men have left villages of women, young children, and oldsters. Is it an easier way of looking at things?
In seriousness, in a panel on the multi-cultural future, Luis asked the audience to imagine how desperate parents in El Salvador or Honduras must be to gather last resources, give them to a smuggler, and hope that a child makes it to the beautiful north. We’re talking, he said, not about an immigration problem, but about desperation and a refugee problem of major and international proportions. 
All of which reminded me that in my reading of early European settlers among the Indians of North America there is always an undercurrent of desperation. We think and talk of rugged and heroic individuals, but the reality was more often young, scared, and hungry men being chased by circumstances to find something better.
They came to the new world—fleeing the Little Ice Age they couldn’t name but the drought and hunger they felt—as indentured servants, brought to the dock by desperate parents who signed them over to ships’ captains to be auctioned for servitude in Virginia or Massachusetts. With time—two years or five or seven—they might get freedom and a purchase on land or property of their own. The women, chained by marriage and children and living in fear of death by childbirth and death of children, followed on.
And their children, not indentured, but often poor, would push further West. And the companies—fur companies, railroads, charters—would tell them that “rain followed the rails,” that beaver were as thick as cats, that there was gold to be had, that there was “free” land—land stolen from Indians that could be “pre-empted” by Oregon Country settlers beginning in 1841, or homesteaded across the West after 1862.
The men who sold the furs in Europe, made the Levis in California, and owned the railroads everywhere made the money. But the rest of us—our parents and grandparents—at least many of us, hung on and created a country.

And now the rest of us—many of us at least—want to shut the door that opened for our hungry grandparents. How often do we think about those parents who sent our grandparents—or great grandparents—off to an unknown, but just maybe better, future? How do we forget so easily?
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Indian Gardens—one more time!


Ok, I should have thought this whole thing through before launching food travel theories. Josephy reminded us years ago, in Indian Heritage of America, 1492 and other places, that about half of present world food crops originated in the Western hemisphere: corn, beans, manioc, chocolate, tobacco—well, food and medicinal/drug crops. And we all know from fourth grade Thanksgiving programs that corn—Mesoamerican corn—had arrived in New England long before the English!
Diorama of Iroquois Indians tending maize caption, New York State Museum

But it is also true that Indians of what is now the Pacific Northwest were traditionally hunters, gatherers, and fishers, and most of these crops were not found in the region at the time of first white contact, Indians of the region had established economies and food cultures over countless generations before white contact, food cultures built around salmon, game, and readily available roots, bulbs, and berries. Did they have knowledge of corn? And when did tobacco arrive? Did they come through Indian trade routes, or with Delaware and Iroquois who were, by the late eighteenth century, part of the western fur trading business, or were the French and British traders themselves responsible for bringing tobacco, corn, and other domesticated vegetables West?

Friends have gently reminded me of the long association of Indians and gardens, and of the extensive pre-Columbian trade routes in North America. Keith Kirts speculated on crops coming from the Southwest—as horses surely did—before whites came overland. And Ralph Anderson commented that “From the east coast all through the Mississippi country were the remains of the mound-builders, corn and squash and beans gardens…  the agriculture that allowed the concentrated populations. By the time of the invasions of the Northwest… 1815-1820’s the Anishinabe had been gardening with and around the British forts and settlements for nearly 100 years.”
And as mentioned earlier, my mentor Alvin Josephy, and in his wake Charles Mann, in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, have tried to sledge-hammer home the importance of the pre-Columbian development of world food crops in this hemisphere.
These reflections and conversations have taught me that the development of domesticated agriculture in what we now call the Pacific Northwest is a complicated affair. The Spaldings and Whitmans probably have their places in it, but theirs are small roles in the very interesting drama of food and its travels around the globe.

 

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More on Nez Perce gardens and fur traders


I argued against missionary Spalding as the original source of Wallowa Nez Perce gardens in my last blog post, went on a laborious journey through Spokane House, Spokane Garry, the Church of England, and the fur trade as alternative sources of seeds and irrigation techniques. And then got onto the thought that this all happened with people and players—Hudson’s Bay, the North West Fur Company, David Thompson—who end up being on the Canadian side of history, so do not get attention in standard USA history books.

I think that last line is quite true, but my circuitous argument about Spokane Garry and his time at the Red River School under the Anglicans probably was too much. Friend and long-time historian of the fur trade John Jackson—Children of the Fur Trade—made it all simpler in a brief response to my post:

“The curmudgeon can’t resist pointing out that the early Nor’westers tried planting gardens at places they passed, just in hope something might grow.  I think David Thompson even put in some peas, turnips, and barley at the Tobacco Plains on the Kootenay River by 1809 or so. That surely was before Presbyterians at Walla Walla, and Methodists didn’t plant anything until they got to fine land claims in the Willamette Valley.
“Gardening is just a step away from digging roots and tribeswomen were imaginative.  The Astorians were not very pleased with the gardens on the lower river but seeds could have found their way upstream.  Tribes may have been growing corn or tobacco, although I can’t recall seeing any reference to seeds from the HBC [Hudson’s Bay Company] or NWC [North West Company].  Jack Nisbet [author of Sources of the River, a chronicle of Nisbet’s attempt to follow David Thompson’s travels across Western North America to the Pacific] has some comments on growing tobacco if I recall correctly.”
How right that all sounds. Tobacco was a common trade good, and there is nothing like an addictive crop to spur opportunistic gardening in the territory. And those fur traders returned to their posts again and again—even ones built hastily when they ran out of travel season and hunkered for a winter, so a bit of tobacco or some spuds or turnips planted in spring would be welcome in a fall return to old posts and places.
And ships—Russian, English, Spanish, and French—traveled the Pacific Coast long before missionaries and white settlers came overland. A smallpox epidemic, which probably arrived by sea, killed 30 percent of the indigenous population of what we now call the Pacific Northwest in the 1770s. Seeds surely could have traveled the same routes. And once ashore, might have made it to the big fishing and trading grounds at Celilo along with the dentalia so popular in Indian adornment. And from Celilo—anywhere!
So my Jackson informed guesses are: 1. that the Nez Perce gardens on the Grand Ronde River owed somehow to the fur traders; 2. that missionaries kept more notes and diaries than did fur traders—and were better marketers of their exploits; how central Whitmans and Spaldings are to the standard Northwest narrative; 3. that Indian trade networks were extensive and that goods moved up and down the Columbia and across the West way before the Whitmans and Spaldings–so seeds and gardening knowledge were traveling in many directions by the time of the Ws and Ss; and 4. that in this case as in many others we neglect the people and events that were important in their time in the Oregon Territory, but ended up on the Canadian side of the narrative of North American history.
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Beaver hats

Sometimes you read something or hear something or something happens that changes how you look at the world. For me, reading Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, and thinking about world history in terms of the “Columbian Exchange” did that. For the first time, I connected the fact that potatoes originated in the Andes—that I had picked up somewhere along the line, with the potato famine in Ireland and the potato lefse that my grandmother made every holiday. That the Americas were vibrant places full of humanity and human influenced landscapes before the Pilgrims settled Plymouth suddenly became obvious—how did the corn, beans, and pumpkins get to the far north anyway?
How I wish I could have talked with Alvin about Charles Mann. Better yet, how good it would have been to put them together. That is kind of what we did in our class this Wednesday (“Introduction to Indian Studies and the Nez Perce Story” on Wednesday mornings at the new Josephy Center). We were reading Alvin’s “The Hudson Bay Company and the American Indians,” which first appeared in three parts in the Westerner, and then again as “By Fayre and Gentle Meanes” in American West Magazine in 1972.
We discussed beaver hats. The fur trade, after all, supplied furs—at a dizzying pace—to England and Europe for the purpose of making felt hats, beginning in the early 1600s and continuing for at least 200 years. Why the hubbub about beaver furs and hats? It turns out beaver fur is extraordinarily good for felting—something about the small hooks on hairs meshing together in the felting process—and that hats were already, in the sixteenth century, signs of status and socio-political points of view in the old world. And that the beaver on that continent (I think they are not exactly the same as the new world beaver, but we’ll leave that side road to other investigators) were all but trapped out. 
In the new world, early white settlers were finding it tough to make a living with farming. And there are records of Dutch settlers sending furs across the Atlantic in the early 1600s; the Plymouth colony soon followed suit. And fishermen plied the Atlantic Coast, and occasionally put in to pick up Indians to sell as slaves across the sea, and occasionally added furs to their trade goods (it is thought by many that white fishermen were responsible for bringing smallpox to the coastal Indian peoples, and thus reducing the indigenous population—and their potential resistance—by 90 or 95% just a few years before the more famous Pilgrims arrived).
Soon French and English trappers and traders were vying for trapping ports and Indian tribes to provide them with furs. Eventually, the Hudson Bay Company, chartered in 1670, became the dominant trader with Indians and supplier of beaver pelts to the old world. There were differences in how French and English traders worked—the French were more likely to intermarry with Indians and adopt more of Indian culture. Traders brought guns and diseases along as they pressed north and west. There were issues of control of tribal lands—the Crown gave Hudson Bay a “charter” for a huge hunk of what is now Canada; the Louisiana Purchase transferred “claims” to Indian lands from the French to a young United States, etc., and wars among French, English, American, and Indian forces grew alongside the fur trade.
Alvin chronicles the movements of traders and of tribes, the diseases, the growing dependencies of tribes on white men’s goods, the place of alcohol, the peace making and the confrontations, and the “softening” of tribal lands for the waves of settlers who would soon follow. He doesn’t tell us much about the beaver and beaver hats. I think Mann would have talked with him about that. For your edification and fun, here is a web site that has a lot of information on the topic: http://people.ucsc.edu/~kfeinste/beaverhat/Main.html. The site will also tell you about issues of class and gender in Europe, and show you pictures of some of the finest hats.
Alas, the fur trade and the place of beaver hats in national life and international diplomacy is a fascinating one that gets sleight treatment in standard history texts. Imagine felt hats getting all the way back to the Andes!
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Blinded by the times

When he wrote the essay on the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Indians, Alvin Josephy took great pains to place it all in historical context. And he credited the company with high mindedness in establishing standards for dealing with the Indians—the traders were not to use alcohol as trade goods, not to marry Indian women, and were to build peaceful relationships with them and promote peace among the tribes. Measured against French, American, and other British traders, Josephy gives the HBC good marks.

“Nevertheless,” says Josephy, “the relations between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the American Indians can be seen fairly and truly only from a perspective that recognizes the imperialistic dynamics of the company during its fur trade heyday [1670-1870]…” The lynchpin of those dynamics was the doctrine of discovery, a notion of sovereignty developed by the Catholic Church and European governments which assumed that Europe and European culture and religion were superior to all indigenous peoples and cultures in the rest of the world, and then gave European powers control of those people and lands by discovery and conquest. This agreement among European people and powers—that some humans were by God’s law and grace superior to others—drove imperialism for at least two centuries.

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In the emerging American colonies the slave trade was crucial to development—to the agricultural development in many colonies and to the commercial development of others. As the idea of independence from England spread, there was some debate about slavery, but, in the end, even its detractors caved in to an American assumption, an often open but almost universally implicit notion, that whites were by nature superior to people of color. John Adams deplored slavery, but realized that a union could not be secured without it. Jefferson deplored slavery, but held his slaves, and on his death, freed only a handful, allowing the larger number of them to be sold to pay down debts. Even the “enlightened” were blinded by, or at best compromised by, their times.

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Fast forward to our own times. A dozen years ago I was putting together a Fishtrap program exploring the “legacy of Vietnam.” I recruited Viet vet and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa and other veterans who had written short stories and novels about their experiences. And Xuan Nguyen, a Vietnamese war widow who had served as translator to an American war widow as she went to Vietnam to see the place and circumstances of her husband’s death, and to produce a documentary about it called “Regret to Inform.”

I thought it would also be good to have a resister, one of the men who had gone to Canada to avoid the War, and mentioned this to writer friend Valerie Miner. “What do you mean, the men who went to Canada?” she said. “What about the women? Who do you suppose made the meals and put together the paperwork?” She had been one of them, and after Canada had moved to Sweden and to England before returning to the States—then only after amnesty was declared.

I thought back to my own Vietnam War years. I had been in the Peace Corps when it all exploded, got easy deferments then, and was conveniently 26 by the time the draft lottery replaced individual draft boards and confusing deferment policies. Overseas and confused about the war’s beginnings, I found myself in Washington D.C. in late 1967, exploring its politics and, ultimately, joining the protest against it. I was at the first Pentagon march, and have been proud of that over the years.

But Valerie’s remarks brought me up short. Made me remember signs along the route of that march. “Girls say no to boys who go” they shouted. Only years later, as I planned the conference on the legacy of Vietnam, did I realize what that said about boys who did not go—and the girls who supported them. In those pre-feminist or early feminist days, girls’ rights, girls’ minds and bodies were of lesser value and at the service of boys.

As historians and as citizens, it is important to consider world views and blind spots of the times we consider, whether those times be 300 years ago, or mere decades back, pieces of our own times.

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The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Indians

I just read “The Hudson Bay Company and the American Indians,” a three-part series Alvin originally published in 1971 in The Westerners: New York Posse BrandBook (I love the Westerners! See November 2010 post) that was reprinted with color photography as “By Fayre and Gentle Meanes,” in American West Magazine.

Fayre and gentle was how the Hudson’s Bay company men were supposed to treat, or “Draw downe the Indians” to their purpose. Their purpose was the acquisition of furs. Alvin says that the company did not come to “conquer or dispossess the Indians. It did not covet their land, hunting grounds, or fishing stations. It did not mean to disrupt them or undermine their beliefs, destroy their means of existence, shatter their organizations and ways of life, or change them into white men… It was a commercial enterprise, in business to make a profit by buying furs peacefully from the natives at prices that would bring the highest rewards to its stockholders.”

Of course it was not that simple, and the good efforts of the company men to obtain furs and keep peace among the tribes so that they would not lose sources, and would in fact gain new ones as they moved west, in practice led to tribe fighting tribe for privileged station and Hudson’s Bay competing against other companies for the trade. In practice, guns used as trade goods meant tribal violence, and alcohol, specifically prohibited as a trade good by the Hudson’s Bay office in London, was used and raised its havoc with Indians with little or no immunity to its effects. In practice, traditional cultures, land uses, and livelihoods were disrupted.   

Most importantly Alvin continues, “The cumulative impact of all these destructive forces impaired the Indians’ ability to cope with the more aggressive whites who followed the fur men into the Indian country, seeking timber, mineral wealth, and land. With the withering of the fur trade and abandonment of posts, the Indians, dependent for so long on the trade, were left impoverished and helpless… In the long run, [this] was to be the most enduring and damaging effect of the fur trade.”

Once again Alvin found a practice and practitioners—the fur trade and the trading companies—and linked them to the flow of Indian and Western American history.  The discussion could now go many ways—the role of alcohol in white expansionism; the impact of white and European commerce on Indian lands and the flow of American history; how guns changed Indian tribal relationships; what the Indians taught whites about native foods and survival as fur traders moved across the country, etc. 

Or we could burrow into the fur trade. My guess is that Alvin began research on the subject while working on the big Nez Perce book, and the articles sited above grew from that. But later, in the 1990s, he worked extensively on the Duncan McDougall log books and Alfred Seton journals from Astoria. He was editing them for Sleepy Hollow Press in New York, but the project was disrupted by the death of Nelson Rockefeller –but that is another story! (and one we have several folders on in the Josephy Library).

p.s. Alvin allowed Hudson’s Bay reps to respond to his articles, and printed their comments as footnotes. He says they did not dispute the facts, but disagreed on some interpretations. Who knew Hudson’s Bay was still alive and still cared about public perceptions of long ago events.

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