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This chapter outlines and analyzes the structure, function, and goals of the Russian-American Company (RAC) as a business venture, an imperial factor, and a colonial administration. It focuses on this colonial company's attempt to adapt the West European joint-stock monopoly model (exemplified by Great Britain's Hudson's Bay Company, among others) to the Russian imperial setting. It also highlights the tensions and contradictions between the Company's business interests and its obligations to the imperial government. The chapter argues that, in its operation of the American colony and the marine fur trade of the North Pacific, the Russian-American Company functioned as a contractor for the Russian Empire.

Chapter one places Detroit within the early eighteenth-century fur trade, sketching the networks, routes, commodities, and business practices that characterized it. It focuses particularly on French rule, from 1701 to 1760. It argues that Detroit's “frontier” positioning—its remote location, commercial potential, and profitability—made non-fur-trade-related commerce (or, more broadly, economic and cultural incorporation into the North Atlantic world) possible and successful, which began in the late 1730s. Detroit's positioning and the broadening out of its population enticed British merchants to relocate to Detroit after 1760, bringing with them their established transatlantic business networks, commercial development schemes, business acumen, and access to popular culture and merchandise.

This chapter examines the historical impact of fur trapping and fur trade on beaver populations. The beaver has lured fur trappers and traders more and more deeply into the northern wilderness from the mid-1600s to the late 1850s, a period spanning 200 years. Prehistoric finds show that early humans were attracted to beaver sites. In Somerset in southwest England, for example, beaver-gnawed willow sticks were found in association with human plank-built trackways from the Neolithic. This chapter traces the beginnings of fur trapping and fur trading from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. It looks at the so-called beaver wars between England and France that erupted in the seventeenth century, the steps involved in making a beaver hat, and beaver trapping today.

This chapter traces the emergence of Metis communities around Plains fur trading posts and the subsequent growth and elaboration of Plains Metis culture in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It explains how these Plains Metis communities were rooted in the environmental exigencies and economics of the fur and provisions trade and linked to Indigenous power networks that were part of a larger, hybrid borderland world. In dedicating themselves to the year-round pursuit of buffalo, the members of these nascent Plains Metis communities helped create economic networks that crossed the different commercial, imperial, and national jurisdictions that existed on the early nineteenth-century northern Plains.

The French, particularly the Chouteau family, were remarkably successful as merchants in St. Louis, not only because of their entrepreneurial skill and their political acumen, but also because of their connections and land claims. Moreover, their geographical position in Missouri allowed them to make profits out of frontiers in transition even as they were consolidating their control of the fur trade on the Upper Missouri and elsewhere in the new American Far West. This chapter examines the actions of the French on the ground in the various Wests beyond St. Louis, focusing on their role as brokers of frontiers in western Missouri and in the present-day states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, as well as in a Hispanic region on the international border between Mexico and the United States. In considering their place in western expansion, the chapter provides a case study not only of the dispersion of the French, but also the French in the process of middle-grounding.

This chapter situates Siberia in the Eurasian context. Local Siberian populations endemically endured encounters with nomadic groups that migrated across the continent in waves. Many of these groups moved westward, such as the Turkic nomads who moved northeast across the Eurasian landmass. This chapter first provides an overview of the Islam that was brought by some of the nomadic Turks to Eurasia before discussing the Sibir' khanate and Muscovy's aggression towards Siberia. It then examines Russian expansion into Siberia, with particular emphasis on the role of the Stroganov family. It also considers the fur trade in Siberia, along with Russia's instrumentalist approach to Siberian commerce. Finally, it evaluates the Siberian economy within the context of the Russian Empire and explains how the Volga trade linked Astrakhan and Kazan.

Weasels molt twice a year, by the same process everywhere. This chapter begins by describing the hormonal control of this cycle. In predictably cold climates, the new autumn hair grows out white over the entire body except for the black tail tip of stoats and long-tailed weasels (the “ermine” condition); in spring the new hair is brown. Where winter snow is less predictable, many individuals turn only partially white (the “pied” condition). Whether a given weasel turns white in a given winter or not was once believed to be an individual response to a temperature “switch,” but now it seems more likely that winter-whitening is a genetically controlled local adaptation (pied individuals are probably hybrids). The chapter describes the distribution of winter-white weasels and its connections with climate and reproduction, and the uses of ermine to trim ceremonial robes, symbols of high status in both European and Native American tradition.

This chapter opens with the 1788 encounter between Chief Tatoosh, the highest-ranked Makah titleholder at the time, and John Meares, a British maritime fur trader. Focusing on the web of regional trade and kinship ties, it explains that borderlands networks and related diplomatic protocols already existed when Europeans and Euro-Americans arrived in this corner of the Pacific. Indigenous networks and protocols shaped the initial period of Native and non-Native interactions on the Northwest Coast from the late eighteenth century into the 1800s. Makahs used customary marine practices, such as hunting sea otters and fishing, to engage expanding networks of exchange. Providing sea otter pelts and provisioning ships were the first examples of this pattern that recurs throughout Makah history. By exploiting networks of trade and kinship, Native chiefs controlled spaces on their own terms and frustrated imperial processes. Their ability to do so reveals that the broader processes of encounter, resistance, and conquest reshaped the indigenous world.

This chapter explores the role of violence and theft within the ča·di· (“cha-dee”) borderland during the era of maritime fur trading. Although these activities marked encounters among Natives and non-Natives, they were much more than the simple conflicts and acts of plundering percieved by ship captains and crews. Violence marked encounters because rival chiefs competing with each other to control space, resources, and people in the borderlands. When imperial actors entered the borderlands, they exacerbated older lines of tension, created new opportunities for conflict, and applied their own tools of violence. In the indigenous borderlands where distinct people contested over and shared spaces and resources, violence and theft were neither anomalous nor a result of miscommunication: threats and violence were mechanisms central to both Native and imperial processes of this period. Indigenous leaders such as Tatoosh used these to expand their influence and to frustrate imperial designs for domination of tribal space.

As the maritime fur trade shifted its focus farther north along the Northwest Coast during the early nineteenth century, Makah men used whaling to engage the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), a new commercial and colonial force in the region. This chapter opens with Makahs “pillaging” a shipwrecked HBC vessel and concludes with the smallpox epidemic, two critical events in the early 1850s. These incidents resulted from the changing nature of the mid-nineteenth-century ča·di· borderland, specifically the transition from maritime to land-based fur trade, the rising power of the HBC, and the arrival of British and US settlers. The region also underwent a geopolitical change as the United States and Britain maneuvered to define their colonial claims to the Oregon Country, an area of joint occupation in the Far North American West until 1846, when the two nations divided the region along the forty-ninth parallel. In the process, a more traditional borderlands between two colonial empires emerged, yet conditions of the preexisting indigenous borderlands continued long after the two nation states settled the boundary question. Amid these changes, the supposed pillaging of the ship and the smallpox deaths highlight the ways indigenous peoples such as Makahs experienced, interacted with, and responded to settler-colonialism. The actions of Makah chiefs maintained their control and ability to influence others. By engaging new opportunities, the same chiefs also made colonialism possible in this region.

Scholars have identified five main turning points that they claim initiated Iroquois decline. The first model holds that Iroquois matrilineal institutions were unable to endure the demographic upheavals caused by European-borne epidemic diseases and the warfare and adoption that accompanied them; these upheavals began in the seventeenth and continued into the eighteenth centuries. A second position maintains that the Iroquois never recovered from their military defeats in the Twenty Years' War, notably the 1687 defeat of the Senecas by the Denonville expedition. Proponents of a third model argue that the Iroquois were defeated and dominated by the unilateral European construction of trading posts/forts at Niagara and Oswego from 1718 to 1724. A fourth interpretation claims that the Iroquois political-economic position was undermined by the shift in European fur trade interests away from Iroquoia to the Ohio and Mississippi valleys in the 1740s and the elimination of the French from Canada in 1760. The fifth model maintains that Iroquois autonomy was undermined by European territorial encroachment and reservationization after the American Revolution. This chapter summarizes the main points of these models and evaluates each in light of the archaeological and documentary evidence set forth in this study, demonstrating that many of these models fit neither the Seneca region nor the rest of the Confederacy particularly well.

Employing an indigenous-centered perspective, this chapter explores the impact of material objects recovered from houses, hearths, and camp facilities received by the Chinook (at the mouth of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest of North America) as gifts, purchased, used, modified, repaired and discarded. These materials come from the Middle Village (qí’qayaqilxam) component of the Station Camp/McGowan site (45PC106), a traditional summer village occupied recurrently by hunter-gatherer-fishers during the early fur-trade period (ca. A.D. 1788-1825). The manner in which new forms of capital, like glass trade beads, muskets, European and Chinese ceramics, copper and iron goods, and glass bottles, were integrated into Chinook economic and political systems is important in the study of colonialism and culture contact. Combined with ethnographic and ethnohistorical data, their use is contextualized within dramatic social and demographic changes in Chinook culture as it intersected with British and American commercial trade.

This chapter focuses on the obscure men who initiated the fur trade that emanated from St. Louis, among them Pierre Laclède Liguest, Jean-Louis Lambert dit Lafleur, and Louis Perrault. In his classic study, The American Fur Trade of the Far West, Hiram Martin Chittenden portrayed Laclède and Auguste Chouteau as the founders of the St. Louis fur trade. However, the most important sources for understanding the early St. Louis fur trade are manuscripts housed at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis and the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. Drawing on these heretofore neglected sources, the chapter brings to center stage an entirely new cast of characters that animated the early St. Louis fur trade: négociants, commerçants, and voyageurs. It considers the origins of fur trade in early St. Louis and the traders' competitions with the British, along with the Indians' involvement in the trade.

Smoking tobacco pipes was more than simply a leisure practice among labor class French Canadian voyageurs. Rather, smoking played an active role in the struggle over the terms and conditions of the fur trade workplace. White clay pipes were key material symbols of male French Canadian identity and were even celebrated in the voyaguer’s chansons—songs used to keep time as they paddled. Fur trade elites (the bourgeois), however, tended to link smoking with “laziness,” a powerful trope in capitalist discourse. This chapter examines the practice of smoking among the voyageurs and the role of clay pipes in mediating class tensions and reproducing French Canadian identity.

After the War of 1812, St. Louis emerged as a clearinghouse for regional settlement and a route to the Far West—especially New Mexico and the Upper Missouri. It also became the center of the nation's defense business and occupied a central position on western transportation routes. The city's merchants controlled the western fur trade, which remained the principal enterprise of the Chouteau family until the 1840s. However, the nature of the business changed dramatically after the war, in part due to the rise of two powerful companies that drove out or absorbed smaller enterprises and exercised an ever-increasing amount of control over the business: John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company and Pierre Chouteau Jr. and Company. The American Fur Company was eventually bought out by Chouteau. A look at the careers of several francophone merchants in Indiana offers clues on francophone merchants based on the story of the Chouteaus.

Fort St. Joseph was an important French trading post in the western Great Lakes for nearly a century. Furs and provisions from the region were exchanged for imported goods such as cloth, metal tools, and glass beads, among other objects used in daily life. Zooarchaeological investigations conducted at the site for over a decade have yielded copious amounts of animal bones along with artifacts and features associated with collecting and processing animals for furs and food. An examination of archaeological remains from the site provides insights into animal exploitation patterns and their role in subsistence and exchange.

The origins of historical archaeology in the Pacific Northwest of North America in the mid-twentieth century concentrated on the excavations of British terrestrial fur trade forts, but little synthesis and inter-site comparisons of available data has been completed. This chapter presents a comparative typological analysis of these early-nineteenth-century British and Chinese ceramic wares recovered from the Northwest Company’s Fort Okanogan (ca. 1811–1821), Fort Spokane (ca. 1810–1821), Fort George (ca. 1811–1821) and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver (ca. 1825–1860). This study helps to reveal the extent that early Victorian ideals gave precedence to the supply of British manufactured goods to these colonial outposts on the opposite side of the world and what the presence of these ceramic wares may reveal about the complex interethnic relationships and socioeconomic statuses of the occupants of these forts and the Native Americans who engaged in trade with these forts.

This chapter introduces the long history of beaver and human interaction, discussing the folklore of First Nation peoples to whom the beaver was a sacred link to the Earth’s creation and the Catholic Church’s classification of them as fish; fur wars over their luxuriant pelts in North America; and the cultural beliefs of the use of their castoreum as a medicinal product, including curing all kinds of fever, relief of toothache, prevention of insomnia, and treatment of stomach disorders. This chapter identifies the historic and current distribution range of both beaver species, each of which, after avoiding near extinction in historic times, in this more modern era been widely reintroduced. Numerous beaver restoration projects have focused on the rebooting of their critical role as ecosystem engineers. Eurasian beavers have recently been restored to more than 20 countries in Europe, with minimum estimates of 1.5 million individuals globally. In North America, populations returned from a low of several hundred thousand at the beginning of the nineteenth century to now approximately 6 million beavers.

Kinship ties were important to the French of the Creole Corridor. Creole merchant capitalists, as a primarily urban group with commercial aspirations and genteel cultural practices, valued continuity and reputation more than spontaneity and democracy. The historiography of the fur trade demonstrates the difficulty of finding an appropriate framework in which to place the activities of these Creole merchants. This chapter examines the expansion of the Chouteau family businesses and the family itself over three generations, focusing on family structure and marriage strategy over time. It looks at the education or apprenticeship of younger family members and the problem of continuity, the problem of profligate sons and the stress arising from such a close relationship between family and business, and the role of women within the family. Finally, the chapter suggests how focusing on families on the frontier can alter our traditional view of western expansion.