Pelts and Prosperity: The Fur Trade and the Mohawk Valley, 1730–1776

Abstract

Pelts and Prosperity: The Fur Trade and the Mohawk Valley, 1730–1776 Nolan M. Cool (bio) In a May 1770 letter to New York City merchant John Thurman, the Schenectady fur trading merchant firm Phyn and Ellice explained, “we may have it in our Power to Purchase in Preference to the Albanians when the Peltry comes in.” In this way, the Scottish firm asserted its advantageous geographic location in the Mohawk Valley, situated between the trading center of Albany and Great Lakes fur suppliers farther west.1 New York’s savvy frontier fur traders, merchants, and businessmen understood the importance of the economic groundwork they laid in the Mohawk Valley during the colonial era, even if modern historians have largely ignored them. Scholars tend to focus on city-based merchants in Albany and New York City, identifying Oswego as the distant supply point for western furs. Mohawk Valley merchants seldom appear in the historiographical record, and no historical work explores the geographic advantage that these merchants commanded between Albany and Oswego.2 But the finer details of colonial entrepreneurship on the Mohawk Valley frontier prove invaluable for a fuller understanding of how geography, business [End Page 122] relationships, and economic expansion converged to create economic opportunities large and small. Though eighteenth-century businessmen involved in the fur trade faced a gradually declining and unstable market, a handful of Mohawk Valley merchants capitalized on the region’s unique geography and successfully adapted their position in the colony’s fur trading network. Located between the fur-bearing settlements farther west and England’s peltry market, these businessmen entered the period’s high-risk, high-reward fur trade and successfully took advantage of widespread business connections to attain economic prosperity. Mohawk Valley fur merchants were the commercial conduit between their Atlantic business connections and Great Lakes peltry suppliers. Recorded in countless eighteenth-century ledgers and letters, a steady supply of British trade commodities provided this small group with the means to keep the pelts flowing from farther west. From 1730 until Britain’s victories in the Great Lakes region during the French and Indian War, Mohawk Valley merchants favored Oswego, despite high shipping costs to and from the western post. After the conflict and during the lead-up to the American Revolutionary War between 1763 and 1776, these businessmen dealt with constant financial obstacles, including high import-export tariffs at colonial port cities and non-importation agreements. Mohawk Valley merchants remained ingrained in New York’s fur trade despite these barriers. The few largely landed, white businessmen who were involved in the fur trade also encouraged neighboring farmers, settlers, and traders on the New York frontier to supplement their wealth through bartering furs. Thereby, Mohawk Valley merchants and their neighbors contributed to each other’s economic stability. However, only the most prosperous merchants recognized and adopted their advantageous position between western peltry suppliers, New York City shipping agents, and English entrepôt dealers. As the middle ground between East and West, these well-connected businessmen made furs a major commodity in their commercial enterprise as they laid the foundations for westward expansion through New York’s frontier, the Mohawk Valley. [End Page 123] Prologue: The Race for Colonial Supremacy and Commercial Empire Between 1609 and 1664, merchants from Amsterdam engaged in a lucrative fur trade in the Dutch colony of New Netherland. Among their various trading partners, the most important were the Iroquois Five Nations, especially after the Dutch West India Company built Fort Orange at the site of present-day Albany, New York, in 1624.3 Iroquois homelands lay farther to the west and north, but the Mohawk Valley, a major break in the Appalachian Mountain chain, functioned as a veritable highway between the Iroquois and Company agents at Fort Orange.4 During the late-seventeenth century, overhunting in the Mohawk Valley led to a declining local fur supply, leaving the Mohawk and Oneida with fewer pelts to barter.5 Dutch business officials responded to the local fur shortage by pushing farther west into the Mohawk Valley, closer to the Great Lakes and Ohio River region. Facing colony-wide economic stagnation, Company agent Arent...