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

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More About This Book

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Who'd think you could write a history of the U.S. centered on three centuries of the trade in furs? Dolin has done so in this spirited tale, although you won't find presidents, treaties, and wars. Instead, the main characters are the Indians, Dutch, French, British, Russians, and Americans who sought wealth and a living in the pelts of fur-bearing animals--beavers especially, but also sea otters, fur seals, and buffalo. Beneath this absorbing story lies the relentless drive (a "lethal wave" in Dolin's words) across the continent. In Dolin's telling, westward expansion wasn't fueled by "manifest destiny" or the thirst for empire but by the chase after animals. People as varied as Peter Stuyvesant, John Jacob Astor, Kit Carson, and the roughhewn "mountain men" play their parts over lands as dispersed as New England and Oregon. By the time animals are driven to near-extinction in the late 19th century, the U.S. is filled in. Neither would have happened without the other. Dolin, author of the acclaimed Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, offers another good history well told. 16 pages of color and 16 pages of b&w illus.; map. (July)
Kirkus Reviews
The fascinating story of the fur trade, full of heroism, greed, violence and political conflict. Historian Dolin (Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, 2007, etc.) begins with a mild surprise: The pilgrims yearned for religious freedom but financed their voyage by agreeing to work for seven years to pay back, mostly in pelts, their English sponsors. "The Bible and the beaver were the two mainstays of the young colony," wrote historian James Truslow Adams in The Founding of New England. Later, as settlers moved west, they entered lands well explored by preceding trappers, and America's first multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), made his fortune by sweeping up much of the fur trade from coast to coast. The first California rush was not for gold in 1848 but sea otters after 1800, quickly followed by fur seals. Although the American bison provided meat, it was the market for their coats that drove the massive slaughter. Dolin ends his riveting narrative with the last documented hunt for buffalo skins in 1887. While rising conservation movements stimulated the first legal limits on hunting, the author points out that their aim was to preserve the dwindling animals so that the fur trade could continue. Nevertheless, the laws worked, transforming America from a net exporter to an importer of furs. A delightful history, reminding readers that while noble ideals led to the settling of the United States, the fur trade paid the bills. Author tour to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Denver, Seattle, Portland, Ore. Regional tours in New England and the Midwest. Agent: Russell Galen/Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Kirk Davis Swinehart
As in Leviathan, his highly praised book on U.S. whaling, [Dolin] restores what most of us regard as an American institution to its rightful place on the international stage. The result is easily the finest tale of the trade in recent memory, a crisply written tale unburdened by excessive detail or homespun provincialism.
—The Washington Post
The Barnes & Noble Review

Historian Eric Jay Dolin brilliantly 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 and its unique qualities made the new continent, with its wealth of fur-bearing wildlife, a seemingly inexhaustible resource. The result, as laid out in Dolin's new book Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, was a major boost in the evolution of the colonies into a powerful new player on the world stage.

Modern-day Manhattan, for example, owes its existence to Dutch eagerness to establish dominance in the trade: New Amsterdam was first settled in the early seventeenth century as a fur trading post where they could exchange European metal goods for beaver pelts brought in by Native Americans. The Dutch wielded military power to oust rival Sweden from the colonial fur trade, yet the popularity of their wares proved their undoing. The intense competition from English colonies and from French fur traders came with its own armed backing, and the English Navy would ultimately oust the Dutch from New Amsterdam in 1664.

Dolin sheds insight on the ways the fur trade created international tensions -- in New England, the Great Lakes, and in the expanding West. As traders clamored for access to land controlled by Native Americans, tribes were pushed off their lands, then given guns and liquor, wreaking havoc on their traditional lifestyles. The fur trade also triggered exploration more generally; fur traders were often the first white men to map major rivers, forests, and mountains. The trade and the broader economy that followed in its wake pulled people west, including Lewis and Clark and Kit Carson, culminating in the monopoly of the nineteenth-century fur trader, and celebrated philanthropist John Jacob Astor, whose American Fur Company would open up new trading posts across America (and whose fortune would endow the library that would become a national icon). For all of fur's contentious position in American culture today, Dolin has skillfully illuminated its centrality in our nation's ever-surprising history.

--Chuck Leddy

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780393067101
  • Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
  • Publication date: 7/12/2010
  • Pages: 464
  • Sales rank: 455,276
  • Product dimensions: 6.50 (w) x 9.40 (h) x 1.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Leviathan: The History of Whaling In America, which was chosen as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History; and Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. He is also the author of When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in environmental policy, he lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

Table of Contents

Introduction xv

Part I Furs Settle the New World

1 "As Fine a River as Can Be Found" 3

2 The Precious Beaver 13

3 New Amsterdam Rising 24

4 "The Bible and the Beaver" 37

Part II Clash of Empires

5 Competition, Conflict, and Chicanery 61

6 "Many Hounds Are the Hare's Death" 74

7 Adieu to the French 94

8 Americans Oust the British 117

Part III America Heads West

9 "A Perfect Golden Round of Profits" 133

10 Up the Missouri 166

11 Astoria 189

12 Mountain Men 223

13 Taos Trappers and Astor's Empire 255

14 Fall of the Beaver 279

15 The Last Robe 294

Epilogue: End of an Era 310

Notes 317

Select Bibliography 409

Acknowledgments 413

Illustration Credits 417

Index 421

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
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Sort by: Showing all of 12 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted November 8, 2011

    Fantastic!

    A stunning insight into an overlooked force that shaped the foundation and settlement of our country. Fur... who knew it was that essential? Compelling research and attention to detail. Delightfully written and well-documented. A must for anyone interested in history or with a penchant for the forgotten realities of American history.

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  • Posted January 17, 2011

    A great read!

    This is an exxcellent book for anyone---Indian/White man---who needs to know just what makes us tick as human beings in often unmapped, wild, and unspeakably beautiful continent. The beaver, the sea otter, and the American bison surrendered their lives (unwillingly) by the millions to support foreign fashions and by default toprepare the lznd itself for later settlement. I'd recommend this excellent book to any truly interested student of America.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 9, 2010

    A Wonderful Book about an Unjustly Overlooked Historical Issue

    The American historian James Truslow Adams, in answering what motivated Europeans to colonize American, writes: "The Bible and the beaver were the two mainstays of the young colony. The former saved its morale, and the latter paid its bills, and the rodent's share was a large one." How large, then, was the rodent's share? This is a question that our 2003 book Beaver-Nature History of a Wetland Engineer was unable to answer. Although we left a chronicle sketch about fur trade by focusing on the wax and wane of the mighty Hudson Bay Company (Ch. 17: Here before Christ), the significance of fur trading in the making of North America (the U.S. and Canada) has remained largely unknown to the American public.

    Fortunately, Eric Jay Dolin's recent book, Fur, Fortune, and Empire, brings the unjustly overlooked issue to the fore. Greatly detailed and beautifully written with images aplenty, the book enlivens an interwoven natural, social, economic, and political history of colonial North America, especially during the period between the early seventeenth century and the mid nineteenth century. Even after years of research on beavers, I still find a substantial amount of new information in Dolin's book, especially about the intricate and often belligerent relationships among the Dutch, the English, the French, and Native Americans whose lives were orbiting around beaver furs.
    From my own writing experience, historical nonfiction books are in general difficult to handle because they can easily bore and overwhelm readers with a large number of names, locations, and times. But with an enviable knack of eloquence and elegance, Dolin has succeeded in engaging readers with a sustaining narrative, which makes Fur, Fortune, and Empire both enjoyable and informative. I am thankful to Dolin for bringing out a wonderful book and congratulate him for accomplishing such a major undertaking. I am pretty sure that neither "buffs" nor experts of American history will find the book disappointing.

    (One minor suggestion: The author may consider adding a chronicle summary for major events at the end of the book. This can be handily done when the paperback version is published.)

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  • Posted November 5, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    This book is a must read for the History Buff!

    I have always been interested in the fur trade to the point that I have dedicated every summer retracing the steps of our leather clad heroes at the annual Mountain Man Rendezvous. Needless to say this book sparked my curiosity considering I have devoured countless books about the subject, and I must say that I was intrigued from the first page to the last. Dolin does an amazing job of retracing the fur trade from the shores of Plymouth in the 17 Century until the last rendezvous in 1841. What impressed me was how the fur trade shaped the direction of our young nation and we still see the remnants of this empire through the names of towns, cities, mountains and rivers across the country. If you enjoy American history this is a must read.

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  • Posted November 1, 2010

    Great book. Thoroughly entertaining

    This book has the best of all worlds. It's a great read and you learn a lot. The period covered is very broad but the book covers it with a good pace. You realize the history of the fur trade is really the history of our country from Jamestown to the final settlement of the American West. There are some amazing stories built within the book including John Colter's amazing escape from the Indians during the Mountain Man era. Also, the early turf wars between the English and pretty much all other European nations. I highly recommend this book.

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