 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Pruice. This lecture looks at the importance of the fur trade in the American West and we're going to look at the time period from about 1800 to 1840. One of the goals of the lectures is to look at the early exploration of the West to summarize efforts to explore the Louisiana Purchase and to understand the significance of the American fur trade. Now we have to understand that Whenever we talk in American history about the exploration of the West, most people immediately think of Lewis and Clark, but there was exploration long before Lewis and Clark. We know the French and the Spanish by the 1500s were exploring the American West. Going up and down the Mississippi, the French were going into Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and over into Kansas, the Spanish, and Florida. So there was a lot of exploration going on and it put Europeans in contact with the fur trade. This was important because the fur trade was declining in Europe. Beaver pelts were being hunted to extinction in Europe. And so the American fur trade, the beavers, the deer skin, and other pelts that were used was very important because fur was important to high culture in Europe and the fur was needed and wanted. And so this opened up many opportunities. The British were exploring as well about the time of the American Revolution. They left what's now Mackinac City, Michigan at that point was called Fort Machellian Mackinac and they began exploring up into the northern states, Minnesota through Iowa. They were still looking for that elusive and impossible northwest passage that would provide a route across the continent for ships. Russians were also exploring the Alaskan coast down into what's today Oregon and northern California, and they too were interested in trade, especially in the fur trade with Native Americans. Later on you had people exploring into Texas, Philip Nolan, General James Wilkinson. They and some of their compatriots had been exploring, had negotiated with New Spain in order to do some horse trading in the area, probably some horse thievery as well. So there was a lot of exploration already going on. When Jefferson commissioned the expeditions, he was really looking to explore the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. And so he sent, most famously, Lewis and Clark to explore the upper Missouri River all the way. They went up through the Snake River into Idaho and Oregon, what's today Oregon and Washington, and they explored and then returned. And they were also trying to look for ways of incorporating Native Americans into America economy and America society, as well as exploring the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase, where what all had the United States bought. Zebulon Pike was another explorer commissioned by Jefferson to look for scientific discoveries, to look at the natural fauna, the natural plants in the area. He was exploring a little bit lower into Colorado to establish trade with the Mexican province of Santa Fe. That didn't work out so well. He was arrested, but later released. And then finally, there were a couple of expeditions, the Hunter Dunbar and Freeman Custis Expedition, to explore the Red River. That's the northern boundary of Texas today, but to explore that river to see if it would lead to a Northwest Passage. Now, because Lewis and Clark did not end up bringing back a lot of the plants and animals, other expeditions were sent out, the Nuttall and Bradbury Expedition. These were European environmentalists, naturalists who went out to explore the plant and animal life in the Louisiana Purchase territory. And there were also people taking advantage of the fur trade. Manuel Lisa, a Spanish citizen who lived in the Louisiana territory under the French, founded the Missouri Fur Company. And one of the first American companies in the Louisiana territory, he and colleagues like Henry Breckenridge did a lot of exploring and trading with Native Americans. The War of 1812 kind of put a halt on the fur trade, but it did spur Western exploration. Because after the War of 1812, as the United States was seeking to expand further into the West, the British competition was gone after the War of 1812, the Americans began building forts up and down the territory. This is the Ohio River, Mississippi Valley area, Fort Smith in the Arkansas, Fort St. Anthony, and they renamed Fort Snelling in 1825. So there were efforts at putting up posts, but these posts were really about the only American presence in much of this territory. You had Americans like John Jacob Astor. Well, he really wasn't American, but he had become an American citizen, and he was interested in founding a company to challenge the domination of the British Hudson Bay Company, which had pretty much sealed up fur trade in what's today Canada and the American Northern provinces. And Astor set up a fort on the Pacific side, and he wanted to exploit trade with Russia. And finally, we want to look at Stephen H. Long's 1820 expedition. Long, an American general, was sent out and he looked at kind of the area, what we would call the Midwest, Nebraska and Oklahoma. And he labeled it on his map, the Great American Desert. And he said the land was, quote, unfit for cultivation and, of course, uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture, end quote. And so what this did was it kind of set in the minds of Americans after 1820 that the American West was a dry, arid place. There weren't many trees. It was all plains. And people believed that trees went with rainfall, that if you had trees, you would have rainfall. It was kind of a illogical proposition, but it had made sense to them at the time, not understanding how the weather worked and how the environment worked. So whenever Long said, well, there's just plains out here, there's really just grass, he didn't see that there was a way of establishing permanent settlements in the American West. What they wanted to do with the American West was kind of change it. They saw this as an area that they could put Native Americans, as Native Americans were being driven from the Eastern States, like the Trail of Tears, et cetera. They were looking for a place west to move these Native American tribes. And so they saw the area beyond the Mississippi River as an ideal place for a large Indian reservation. In the panic of 1819, this was largely due to over-speculation in land. People were wanting to buy the land of the Louisiana Territory, the Louisiana Purchase, and so people were investing heavily in buying up land. But the payments weren't there, the payoff wasn't there, and a lot of people went into debt, banks failed, the Bank of the United States was affected. Thousands of people were affected by this economic, the first economic depression in United States history. But this led to the desire to expand trade, and so you have the development of the Santa Fe Trail. This was a long sought effort by Americans to connect trade between St. Louis and the outpost in far northern Mexico, Santa Fe, because Santa Fe was an isolated community, and there was a lot of trade going on there already, and Americans wanted in on this. And you can see, I have over here on the right, how trade grew. Now, Mexico had just declared its independence from Spain, and so this Santa Fe Trail, the opening of it was very portentious for America's economic growth. And you can see how the trade increased rapidly as a result of opening up this trade route between Santa Fe and St. Louis. One of the other issues in the fur trade is this idea of the mountain men, the rendezvous system. The rendezvous system was really simply, this is a French term for meeting, this was simply a way of calling what they had trade fairs. Native Americans and others had established these trade fairs, and they had been going on among Native Americans for a long time. But Americans really were only active in the rendezvous system, about 12 major fairs in just a half dozen years. So it didn't really last a long time, but it was this idea settled in the hearts and minds of many Americans. There were the development of mountain men, like you've got this image on the left here of Jim Bridger, one of the most famous of the so-called mountain men. These were traders, they traded with Native Americans and others in the West. They were also pathfinders, people like Kit Carson and others helped later on establish trails further out West as Americans desired to move out West, because these people had experience in the West. The Native Americans also had a complicated relationship with their own people, the Metis people. This was a term meaning mixed blood. So when a lot of these mountain men or these traders had moved out, Spanish, French and Americans and British, as they were moving out West and they were interacting with Native American people, they often took Native American brides. And their children were called Metis, and they kind of formed a middle ground. They were had a one foot in both European and American culture and one foot in Native American culture. They spoke both languages. They oftentimes served as intermediaries for negotiations and treaties and whatnot. But how were they treated by both Americans and Native people who never really saw them in many cases as being part of their own people? So the rise of this group is something that needs further exploration. By 1840, the fur trade began to decline and largely this was due to changes in styles in Europe. First of all, there were fewer beavers. We had already hunted the beaver to near extinction in Europe, but also in the United States, in the American North and the West, this was happening as well. Animals were hunted to near extinction and they were also suffering from diseases by Americans, cows, pigs, horses. And the Spanish had brought these over, sure, but as these animals propagated, the diseases they carried with them spread and affected Native American animals. And we also have to look at environmental changes that were going on in the West. There was many years where there were long periods of drought, the amount of rainfall declined significantly in the West, and this also affected animal populations. By about 1840, the market for beaver pelts was giving way and buffalo hides were becoming more and more important. But we hunted the buffalo to near extinction by 1875 and so that fur trade died as well. Also by about the 1840s, 1841, you have people moving further and further west and the development of the Oregon Trail. So if we look at how the fur trade affected the American West, we've got to look at several different things. It was not just one or two issues, but the demands of the fur trade, the demands of trade itself, led to conflicts and competition, not just among European powers, not just among Russia, the British, the Spanish, and the French, and the Americans, but also to conflicts and competition amongst Native Americans. So you had some Native American tribes that were on the ascent that were arising as disease had come in and devastated some of these Native American tribes. The resulting issue was that Native Americans were being exploited for the fur trade. They were being given guns. They were being given weapons. And so this is going to change the power dynamics of Native American tribes because of the access to weapons, because of the access to guns, because of the access to European powers and alliances. So all this is going to change things and going to affect them. Also, you have the rise of Matisse people that these mixed breed, as it was sometimes called, or mixed children of Native Americans and Europeans and American traders and settlers are going to act as intermediaries, as go-betweens. And how are they going to be treated by either society? They're going to be kind of seen as people in the middle. Also, the trade is going to lead to further exploration, as the success of the trade shows that, hey, there's economic import out here. How are we going to expand that? And so you have further and further exploration, and this is all going to be a drain on natural resources. So it's not one issue. It's not one thing, but it's a very dynamic set of circumstances that are going to affect the history of the American West as a result of the fur trade. So in this lecture, we've looked at early exploration of the West and we found the French, the Spanish, the British, the Russian, all of these different countries sent traders and they explored much of the rivers and the Pacific Coastal regions of the American West. Before the 1800s, Jefferson himself, after the Louisiana Purchase, commissioned explorations to determine the boundaries of that territory to evaluate the fur trade and the possibility of integrating Native Americans into the United States, both economically and socially. And we have also learned the significance of the American fur trade. The fur trade led to increased exploration and contact and composition among Native and European nations, and it also challenged the natural resources of the American West. Thank you very much, and we hope to see you again soon.