Fur, Water, and Timber: The Upper Mississippi River Waterscape and Resource Extraction in the Nineteenth Century

• In Event: Extracting and Commodifying Aquatic Resources

Abstract

In the late 1830s, the fur trade of the Upper Mississippi River and Headwaters, once so abundant in fur-bearing beavers and muskrats, declined with the populations of Castor canadensis and Ondatra zibethicus. More than dam-builders, these mammals were key to the continuity of Indigenous economic interdependence with Euro-Americans, and Indigenous sovereign independence in the early nineteenth century. The loss of these species, then, weakened — though did not destroy — both Indigenous trade and sovereignty. This paper argues that the collapse and consequences of the fur trade and fur-bearing mammal’s population in the Upper Mississippi and Headwaters was an assemblage of politics, local ecologies, and economics. Former fur traders such as Henry H. Sibley and Hercules L. Dousman – whose papers this work is based on – diversified their businesses into extracting timber from the Upper Mississippi’s forests. In turn, Indigenous subsistence from trading furs weakened, thus facilitating the United States’ seizure of Indigenous lands and waters in exchange for annuity goods once gained through trade. Finally, timber merchants and mill owners altered local rivers to encourage a constant flow of water to transport logs and power machinery. Thus, this paper emphasizes two key reinterpretations of the history of the fur trade and Indigenous-U.S. treaties. First, the decline of the fur trade and transition of former fur traders to other extractive economies occurred not on land, but on the water; rivers and wetlands were both homes and highways that scaffolded the fur and timber trades. Second, Indigenous-U.S. treaties occurred within an environmental context: The decline of fur-bearing mammals was not an abstract economic event, but was foundational to the literal Indigenous hunger that facilitated the sale and seizure of Indigenous territory – both land and water – by the United States.

Author

• Karl Nycklemoe, Stony Brook University