A Condensed History of the North American Fur Trade

The evolution of cooking has come a long way since since the heydays of eating when possible of the French Canadian Voyageurs and the American Mountain Men who served as the early work horses who bore both the burdens and the dangers of the early Canadian and American fur trades to eating when convenient made possible by contemporary, well equipped high tech kitchens.

In popular folklore, the fur trade of the American Far West generally is viewed to have begun with John Colter, a member of the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition. As they were returning to St Louis, Missouri from their winter quarters at Ft Clatsop on the south shore at the mouth of the Columbia River, their nearly two year sojourn into the unknown western wilderness close to its end, they arrived in the spring of 1806 at the Mandan Villages near present day Mandan, North Dakota.

There, they encountered two frontiersmen who were traveling to the upper Missouri River to hunt furs, Forest Hancock and Joseph Dickson. Colter approached the captains, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and asked permission to join Hancock and Dickson as the only man allowed to leave the expedition before its completion. Due to his exemplary service throughout the ordeal, the captains granted his request and thus began two extraordinary years of adventures and wanderings during which, among other accomplishments, Colter "discovered" Jackson Hole in present day Grand Teton National Park and "Colter's Hell", commonly believed to be the geysers basin of what now is Yellowstone National Park. In fact, it more likely was an area later referred to as the "Stinkin' Hole", a similarly geothermally active region of the Shoshone River just east of Yellowstone Park near today's Cody, Wyoming.

But Cody's most well known, some might say misadventure, occurred in 1808 as he and his trapping partner at the time, a man named John Potts (also a Lewis & Clark Expedition veteran), were canoeing up the Jefferson River in what now is southern Montana south of Three Forks, when they encountered a large band of the hostile, notoriously ferocious Blackfoot tribe. The Blackfeet demanded they come ashore. Colter complied and as he did so, was disarmed and stripped of his clothes. But Potter refused and was shot and wounded. Potter returned fire and promptly was dispatched after being riddled with Blackfoot bullets and his body hacked apart.

The Blackfeet then held a council to determine Colter's fate, after which Colter was summoned and told in Crow to begin running. Thus began a most remarkable sequence of events. Stark naked and realizing he literally was running for his life, pursued by a pack of young braves, each eager to capture the honor of claiming his scalp, after several miles of very fast running (note this, all you marathoners!) Colter, utterly exhausted and nose bleeding profusely, turned his head to see all but a lone brave had dropped far back in the race. The remaining would be assailant soon overcame Colter. What happened next best is described in the immortal 1817 words of John Bradbury, a Scottish botanist who traveled extensively throughout the American West in the early 19th Century:

"Again he turned his head, and saw the savage not twenty yards from him. Determined if possible to avoid the expected blow, he suddenly stopped, turned round, and spread out his arms. The Indian, surprised by the suddenness of the action, and perhaps at the bloody appearance of Colter, also attempted to stop; but exhausted with running, he fell whilst endeavouring (sic) to throw his spear, which stuck in the ground, and broke in his hand. Colter instantly snatched up the pointed part, with which he pinned him to the earth, and then continued his flight."

Colter also grabbed the unfortunate aspiring hero's blanket and continued his flight toward ultimate escape and freedom until he reached the Madison River whereupon, with incredible presence of mind, he jumped in, spied a nearby raft of fallen trees caught against the far bank, grabbed one of the reeds growing alongside, then dove and hid beneath the raft, using the hollow reed as a straw through which he could breath as he felt the vibrations of the Blackfoot braves as they scampered to and fro across the raft searching for him the rest of the day (note this, all you snorkelers!).

As night fell, the Blackfeet, believing he had escaped, withdrew to their encampment at the beginning of that improbable foot race many miles away, and Colter cautiously emerged, alive but cold and sore, from his hiding spot and began his long trek across the intervening mountains and plains back to the Missouri River and on to St Louis. Soon after retreating to St Louis, young (but by then considerably aged!) Mr Colter found himself besmitten by a lovely young lass and before long was bound by the bonds of wedded bliss which entrapped him just as surely as his own traps had ensnared unsuspecting beavers in his previous life. Within a few short years of his betrothal and new life as a farmer on nearby land he had purchased with what remained of the proceeds from selling his pelts of fur, John Colter passed into Eternity. It never has been determined whether John's premature demise was the result of shock caused by the sudden transition from his storied wanderings through uncharted and unknown lands to a life of domesticity or whether the extreme hardships of that strenuous life finally caught up with him and exacted their ultimate toll in the form of his succumbing to an unexpectedly premature expiration.

In truth, the North American fur trade was founded early in the 17th Century (1608) by New World French Canadian settlers who initially were bonded indentured servants who served at their sponsor's pleasure for a fixed period of time in return for their passage from Europe to North American shores. In effect, they were slaves to their masters until their commitments had been satisfied and their masters were financially astute businessmen. (There actually existed a small number of equally astute businesswomen in French Canada back then who were no less conversant with the riches to be gained by exploiting the high European demand for the vast wealth of fine furs that the Interior was known to produce and leveraging the labor of their indentured "servants", ie slaves).

These incredibly strong and hardy men (many of the more legendary ones today would be labeled as "Super Men") bore the back breaking work and long, arduous days of carrying trade goods from Montreal via canoe upon first breakup in the spring to places as far flung as the Northern Canadian Rockies (think Edmonton and Jasper), before returning with hundreds of 90 lb bales of fur at the end of the summer, reaching Montreal just before freezeup. Throughout the extensive lake routes of the Quetico in Southern Ontario and the Boundary Waters in Northern Minnesota, many grueling portages were required in which each man, who generally was of small stature, carried two 90 lb packs on his back for the duration of the portage. Documented instances of some men carrying three such packs exist in the literature of the times and traditional tales speak of at least one 6' 8" giant who reputedly once carried seven of those packs.

In practice, few of these Voyageurs, as they generically have been known through the ages, made the entire journey from Montreal to their cargo's destination, and those who did wintered there. Before long, that custom spread to include some who chose to brave the demanding winters of the intermediate country. (Temperatures at Minnesota's Lake of the Woods weather station occasionally have been known to plunge to -60âÂ�Â� comparable to today's deep freezes at Fairbanks, Alaska at the bottom of the Cheena River Basin, where the average temperatures have warmed measurably over the past several decades). The standard practice was to break the journey in half, with the western and eastern crews meeting to exchange hundreds of tons of cargo at the annual rendezvous in Grand Portage on the shore of a small bay on the north side of Lake Superior in the far corner of Northeast Minnesota. Those who chose to withstand the harsh rigors of Canada's Interior winters were referred to as hommes du nord (northern men) or hivernants (winterers). They often took native wives, had children and raised families with them, in the process spawning an historically underprivileged, unrecognized class of citizens called Metìs who tended to congregate in their own small settlements along Manitoba's Red River. They eventually were destined to play a significant role in expanding the western fur trade south to the Louisiana Territory of the United States.