The Fur Trade — North America and Russia (c. 1534-1867)

During his voyages into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the 1530s and 1540s, French explorer Jacques Cartier conducted some of the earliest documented exchanges of European goods for furs with Indigenous peoples of the region. These incidental trades previewed an industry that would later dominate the continent's economy.

Location: Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Canada

Basque and other European cod fishermen drying their catch on the Newfoundland coast traded metal tools for sewn beaver-robe pelts, known as castor gras. European hatmakers discovered the superior felting qualities of these worn pelts, and the rising fashion for beaver felt hats turned incidental exchanges into a commercial demand that shaped colonial policy.

Location: Grand Banks, Newfoundland

Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec on the Saint Lawrence River, converting the seasonal coastal trade into a permanent interior commerce in furs. His alliance with the Huron and Algonquin nations embedded New France into Indigenous trade networks and diplomacy, beginning the French drive westward across the continent.

Location: Quebec City, Canada

The Iroquois Confederacy, seeking control of fur-trading territory and access to Dutch and later English suppliers, waged decades of warfare against the Huron and other nations aligned with the French. These conflicts, running into the early 1700s, depopulated entire regions and made control of the fur trade a central objective of Indigenous and imperial politics alike.

Location: Northeastern North America

King Charles II granted a royal charter to the Hudson's Bay Company, giving it a monopoly over the fur trade across the vast Hudson Bay watershed, later called Rupert's Land. The charter created one of the oldest surviving corporations and tied the Canadian interior to London capital for two centuries.

Location: London, England

Vitus Bering's expedition reached the Alaskan coast and the Aleutian Islands on behalf of the Russian Empire, where crews found dense populations of sea otters whose pelts commanded high prices in China. Russian promyshlenniki traders followed, launching a maritime fur trade that drove Russian expansion across the North Pacific.

Location: Aleutian Islands, Alaska

Montreal merchants formally organized the North West Company to compete with the Hudson's Bay Company, pushing trade across the Canadian Shield to the Athabasca country and beyond the Rockies. Its French-Canadian voyageur workforce and Indigenous partnerships made it for a time the fur trade's most aggressive operator.

Location: Montreal, Canada

John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company established the settlement of Astoria near the mouth of the Columbia River, the first United States outpost on the Pacific coast, intended to link inland furs to the China trade. The War of 1812 forced its sale to the North West Company in 1813, ending the first American bid for the Pacific fur trade.

Location: Columbia River, Oregon Country

After years of ruinous competition, including the armed clashes of the Pemmican Wars in Red River, the Hudson's Bay Company merged with the North West Company under government pressure, leaving the HBC in control of nearly the entire British North American trade. Its trading posts became the de facto government across much of western Canada.

Location: London, England

Changing European fashions, above all the replacement of beaver felt by silk in hatmaking, sent fur prices into a long collapse from the 1840s. Communities both Indigenous and European that had organized their economies around the trade were plunged into poverty, and the political leverage the trade had given Indigenous nations eroded with it.

Location: Europe and North America

Russia sold Alaska to the United States for 7.2 million dollars, ending the Russian-American Company's Pacific enterprise, which remote supply lines and depleted sea otter stocks had rendered unsustainable. Three years later the Hudson's Bay Company surrendered Rupert's Land to the new Dominion of Canada, closing the era in which fur empires governed the continent.

Location: Washington, D.C., United States