When Europeans first came to the New World, the vast wilderness of North America was the most extensive field in the world for harvesting furs: 200 million beaver, 50 million buffalo, 30 million deer, and countless others. Not surprisingly, for the next two centuries, the fur trade was the principal business and primary export of North America. In the late 1600s, the power struggle between the British and the French to control the fur trade began in earnest, most notably in 1670 after England’s King Charles II granted the Hudson's Bay Company a monopoly to trade in Rupert’s Land, a vast territory encompassing the drainage basin of Hudson’s Bay. This dispute reached its climax with the French and Indian War, which left the British in sole possession of the fur trade.
Tom Hand, creator and publisher of Americana Corner, discusses the North American fur trade and the events that shaped our nation’s history.
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Images courtesy of the Library of Congress, Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, Manitoba Historical Maps via Flickr, Yale Center for British Art, National Gallery of Art, Oregon Historical Society’s Oregon Encyclopedia, Wikimedia.
When Europeans first came to the New World, the Spanish found vast amounts of gold and silver in Central and South America and each year sent a treasure ship back to Spain to fill the king’s coffers. The French and English hoped to find the same sort of treasures in North America but were sadly disappointed. But what they did find was a continent of boundless natural resources, including one as lucrative as Spanish gold, the peltries of the seemingly infinite number of beavers, deer, and buffalo.