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23 chapters
The Author
The Author
Nathaniel C. Hale graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1925. After serving in the Army, he resigned his commission to enter business, but joined the Army again on the outbreak of World War II. He was Commandant of an Officers Training School prior to overseas duty with the Signal Corps. Since the war, Colonel Hale has become well known as an author and historian. In 1952 he received the annual award of the Society of Colonial Wars in New York for his book, VIRGINIA
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VIRGINIA VENTURER
VIRGINIA VENTURER
A Biography of William Claiborne 1600-1677 THE FUR TRADE FURNISHED THE MEANS OF CONTACT BETWEEN WIDELY DIVERGENT CULTURES. THE FUR TRADE FURNISHED THE MEANS OF CONTACT BETWEEN WIDELY DIVERGENT CULTURES....
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PELTS and PALISADES
PELTS and PALISADES
THE STORY OF FUR and the Rivalry for Pelts in Early America By Nathaniel C. Hale Decorative mark RICHMOND, VA. THE DIETZ PRESS, INCORPORATED RICHMOND, VA. THE DIETZ PRESS, INCORPORATED Copyright by NATHANIEL C. HALE © 1959 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA To My Grandchildren...
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Preface
Preface
The story of fur is as old as the story of man. Some brief account of ancient man’s quest for fur is included in the beginning of this book. However, the main narrative is concerned with the rivalry for pelts in early America. The discoverers of our country came here looking for gold. They found it in fur. After that the fur trade formed the pattern of exploration, trade and settlement. It sustained the colonies along the Atlantic seaboard until they could be rooted in agriculture and it was a c
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PELTS and PALISADES
PELTS and PALISADES
Friend, once ’twas Fame that led thee forth To brave the Tropic Heat, the Frozen North; Late it was Gold, then Beauty was the Spur; But now our gallants venture but for Fur. John Dryden, 1672....
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IRoyal Robes and Beaver Hats
IRoyal Robes and Beaver Hats
It might be said that man’s first true possession was the fur skin of an animal. Prehistoric mankind prowled the earth seeking food, shelter and mates—only those needs intended by nature to preserve him and to perpetuate his species. He had no accumulated wealth. Even his first crude weapons, rocks and sticks, were expendable. He had nothing material to treasure until he began to acquire coverings for his body. Body coverings must have become useful to primitive man in the last glacial period, d
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IIVikings and Skraelings in Vinland
IIVikings and Skraelings in Vinland
By the closing years of the fifteenth century, not only were the mercantile classes of western Europe thoroughly awake to the possibilities of world trade, but a good number of other people were beginning to think for themselves about the world around them. If one could cross by land to China, which itself faced on the sea, there must be ways to reach that fabulous country by skirting the land masses of the world. In that manner the Portuguese had discovered an all-water route to India and Malay
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IIICodfish Land Spawns a Fur Frontier
IIICodfish Land Spawns a Fur Frontier
Christopher Columbus probably thought that “the western lands of the world” explored by the Norsemen were island-like masses, similar to Greenland, off the northern coast of Asia. From what he was able to learn, especially on his visit to Iceland, he no doubt concluded that these lands stretched far away to the southeast. He had a mariner’s instinct for such things. Certainly he calculated his landfall in 1492 with amazing accuracy. Columbus came among islands that he confidently took to be the
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IVSamuel de Champlain Lights a Blaze of Red Terror
IVSamuel de Champlain Lights a Blaze of Red Terror
It was the first spectacular profits of the fur trade toward the close of the sixteenth century that brought about a fresh and urgent need for the colonization of New France. The French government saw danger from jealous foreigners, Englishmen in particular. Already the English had attempted settlements to the south at a place called Roanoke. Greatly emboldened on the sea these days they were admitting Spanish claims no more northerly than 34° and French claims no more southerly than 45°. The la
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VEngland Moves to Extend Her Realm
VEngland Moves to Extend Her Realm
England came of age in the sixteenth century. Labor troubles helped to bring this about. When the tenants on demesne land asserted their right to sell their labor to the best advantage, the lords in turn claimed their right to use their lands to the best advantage. Since profitable sheep farming required fewer laborers than ploughing and reaping, less and less acres were kept in cultivation by the lords. Frustrated and starving, the tenants were forced to abandon their homes and seek precarious
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VICaptain John Smith Takes to Trade
VICaptain John Smith Takes to Trade
When Captain John Smith arrived in America early in 1607 he was but freshly turned twenty-seven years of age. And he was in serious trouble—a prospect for the gibbet, in fact, because of alleged treason. On the voyage over he had plotted to supplant those in charge, or so it was charged by his enemies in the expedition. But, when the sealed instructions from the London Company were opened that spring in Virginia, it was learned that John Smith himself was to be a member of the council in the gov
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VIIThe Dutch Profit by a Mutiny
VIIThe Dutch Profit by a Mutiny
In the late summer of 1609 a Dutch ship, the Half Moon , was cruising the coasts of America. It had an English master. The merchants of the Dutch East India Company had engaged the Englishman, Captain Henry Hudson, to search for a northeastern passage to China over the frozen top of the world. Instead, he sailed their ship west. A mutiny compelled him to change his course, or so he later claimed. It seems that his twenty-man crew, mostly Dutch, had been accustomed to warmer seas. They refused to
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VIIIConception of New England
VIIIConception of New England
The Englishmen living already in America, in southern Virginia, were more concerned about the Catholic Spaniards to the south of them than about a few Dutch traders on an unknown river to the north. Jamestown had been planted by the London Company with very much the same objects that Raleigh had in mind when he planted Roanoke—a threat to New Spain among other things. While the colony was young and relatively weak, therefore, the Virginians lived in constant dread of themselves being surprised a
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IXThe Pilgrims Rely on God and Beaver
IXThe Pilgrims Rely on God and Beaver
The first permanent settlement made by the English on the northern coasts of America owed its success to traffic in pelts. Almost from the very beginning in the winter of 1620-21 the Plymouth plantation was a fur-trading post, depending on beaver and otter skins for the maintenance of its inhabitants. And, as Edward Channing has put it, “In the end what saved the Plymouth colony from extinction and gave the settlers a chance to repay the London merchants for their advances was a well managed fur
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XA Border Fixed on the Coast of Maine
XA Border Fixed on the Coast of Maine
The planting of trading posts farther and farther up the coast of Maine by the New Englanders did not go unchallenged by the French. Although in English eyes it had been well established ever since Captain Argall’s raids in the Bay of Fundy that English claims to the coast now extended well above the 45th parallel, even to the St. Lawrence valley, no such admission had ever been made by the French. There were always French traders in Acadia (Nova Scotia) who envisaged their preserves as extendin
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XIThe Bay of Virginia
XIThe Bay of Virginia
When Sir George Calvert, Baron of Baltimore, founded his province of “Avalon” in Newfoundland he was partly motivated by religious urgings. Being a Catholic convert he earnestly wanted to provide a haven in the new world for the persecuted Catholics of England. But this court favorite, who as the son of a humble Yorkshire farmer had figuratively pulled himself up by his own bootstraps to ennoblement, was also a profit-minded promoter. He expected a rich return on his newly gained proprietorship.
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XIIKent Island and the Backside of Virginia
XIIKent Island and the Backside of Virginia
At the time of Lord Baltimore’s arrival the Virginians were already suffering from mass hypertension induced by fear. Early in the summer of 1629 there had been another massacre along the James River, and no sooner had this Indian uprising been quelled than rumors were rife that the Spaniards were about to attack. Captain Claiborne led the colonial forces against the offending Pamunkeys of the Powhatan Confederacy in an effort to “utterly exterpate” them, that being the settled policy of the col
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XIIINew Netherland’s South River
XIIINew Netherland’s South River
The charter of the great Dutch West India Company gave it a monopoly over trade in Africa and America, empowered it to plant colonies and appoint governors of those colonies, make treaties with the aborigines, build forts, and wage war. The company was to maintain its own fleet of twenty warships; but, if it became embroiled in more trouble than this fleet could handle expeditiously, the States General of the Netherlands bound itself to furnish twenty additional armed vessels. Although the compa
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XIVSwedish Interlude On the Delaware
XIVSwedish Interlude On the Delaware
Peter Minuit, erstwhile governor and chief fur trader of New Netherland, was a man of energy and special talent for colonial administration. Although he had been discharged from his post in Dutch America after a disagreement with his employers, the directors of the West India Company, his administration there had been virile and efficient. It was therefore quite natural that he should be a bit vindictive toward the people who had treated him so unfairly. And, because of his driving energy, it wo
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XVNew Netherland Threatened Without and Within
XVNew Netherland Threatened Without and Within
Nowhere in America was there a better situation for a great fur emporium than Manhattan Island. There, converging into a protected harbor which was easily accessible to seagoing ships, were arteries of fur traffic that tapped both hinterland and coastal trade. Indeed, the beaver trade that originated at Manhattan in the round-bellied Dutch ships of the seventeenth century was the genesis of a commerce that was to make New York the greatest seaport in the world. But, although the Hollanders at Ne
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XVIThe English Close Their Coastal Ranks
XVIThe English Close Their Coastal Ranks
All during the trouble he was having with the patroon on the upper Hudson, Peter Stuyvesant was conducting a diplomatic holding action against the mounting pressure on his New England front. This was no easy task in the face of the darkening international situation abroad. After Charles I of England was beheaded in 1649, Cromwell’s jealousy of Dutch commerce had become threateningly obvious. War between the two nations was imminent. And Stuyvesant well knew that the “United Colonies of New Engla
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XVIIWestward the Fur Frontier of America
XVIIWestward the Fur Frontier of America
With the elimination of New Netherland in 1664 the main obstacle to British colonial policy had been removed. Laws providing for a more closely knit relationship between the colonies and the mother country, such as the Navigation Acts, could be enforced. Soldiers now backed up the merchants. Indeed, from this time the expansion of England’s imperial trade system in America would proceed at the point of a gun. That it would expand however, and solidly, was because the English had what it took in
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Bibliography and Acknowledgements
Bibliography and Acknowledgements
Adams, Charles Francis, Three Episodes in Massachusetts History , Cambridge, 1892. Adventures of Marco Polo , ed. by Richard J. Walsh, New York, 1948. Adventurers of Purse and Person, Virginia, 1607-1625 , compiled and ed. by Anna Jester and Martha Woodruff Hiden, Princeton, 1956. Alvord, Clarence Walworth, and Bidgood, Lee, The First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region by the Virginians, 1650-1674 , Cleveland, 1912. Andrews, Charles M., The Colonial Period of American History , 4 vols. ,
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