Fur Trade Research Articles

Shoes, Canoes, and Lives in Unexpected Archives: Searching in Fur Trade Ledgers beyond the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives

This article illuminates the existence and utility of fur trade ledgers and account books held in repositories beyond those held in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives. While the vast holdings of the HBCA are a phenomenal resource for researchers of the North American fur trade, many smaller repositories across the continent hold fur trade sources that can complement research conducted in other institutions. Such sources can, when examined with an eye to the cultural information they contain, reveal far more about the cultural history of North America than simply the economic data for which they were created.

Промышленность, промыслы, ремесла и торговля в Сибири в XVIII в. - 1820-е гг.

The study of history of the region's economy in the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries seriously advanced in the post-soviet Russian historiography. Profound monographic studies on the history of business, industry, trade and crafts were published. There was a need for generalization of research results. The author offers a synthesis of the experience. The article presents an outline of the development of industry, crafts and trade in Siberia in the 18th century - the first quarter of the 19th century, when the region experienced the first results of the transition to the industrial era. At this time crafts predominated, but factories became commonplace. A feature of the manufacturing industry of Siberia was the complete domination of the feudal entrepreneurship of the Treasury, the Cabinet, the nobility and the monasteries, the displacement of private capital in the sphere of trade and crafts. The imperial family took possession of the most profitable non-ferrous metallurgy, depriving plants and mines to private entities for fiscal debts. Mining areas of Altai and Transbaikalia became major suppliers of non-ferrous metals in Russia. During the 18th and 19th centuries their successful operation was due to a unique combination of three factors: the area was rich in ores, in forests for fuel and building materials and in fertile land that could attract and concentrate the peasant population which was used as a workforce. Salt plants that belonged to monasteries were confiscated by the state, iron works were taken over by the Treasury for debt. Distilleries provided for the state wine monopoly. Extraction and production of salt was also the subject of official monopoly. For maintenance of military units, there worked a textile factory in Omsk, Telminsky and Taltzy industrial complexes near Irkutsk. Feudal industry operated on the forced labor of convicts, exiled workers, workmen and bonded peasants. At the beginning of the 19th century, there were signs of the feudal business crisis. Private capital, which worked with the use of hired labor, concentrated in the marine industry, in fishing and fur trade, in craft and trade. Large private capital could only be formed in trade. The exchange of goods between European Russia and Siberia was carried out through a network of fair traders, wholesalers. Merchants sold or lent industrial goods purchased at the Nizhny Novgorod and Irbit fairs at regional urban fairs, from which, in turn, they went to county and local trades in more or less large settlements. Instead, Siberian raw materials and furs were gathered. Domestic trade remained in the form of fairs due to the seasonality of tradeways. In foreign trade, Siberia served as a mediator between European Russia and China. Trade with China through Maimaicheng was of great significance for the Russian trade.

The archaeology of the North American fur trade

The archaeology of the North American fur trade

“He was neither a soldier nor a slave: he was under the control of no man”: Kahnawake Mohawks in the Northwest Fur Trade, 1790–1850

From 1790 to the 1850s hundreds of Kahnawake men signed fur trade contracts, part of a vast, Montreal-centred, salaried labour force that fuelled the peltry trade for two centuries. However, these Mohawks constituted more than simply a native subset of largely French Canadian voyageur brigades. Mohawks were coveted for their abilities as canoe men, ruthless talents as trappers, and their fearsome warrior reputation. Such martial qualities had special value during the “fur trade wars” of 1798–1804 and 1815–1821. These Kahnawake men pursued these contracts for economic and Mohawk-specific cultural reasons. For young Kahnawake men, difficult employment, distant from home and associated with potential violence, was a means to experience rites of passage from adolescence to manhood and to prove warrior qualities. Racialized white views and the need for Mohawks as woodsmen and warriors with fearsome reputations thus coincided with Mohawk views of their masculinity and the need for adventure and income.

Scottish Cultures of Collecting on the Northwest Coast of North America, 1820s to 1860s

This article presents two Scottish museum collections as case studies for exploring cultures of collecting on the mid-nineteenth-century Northwest Coast of Canada. The collections of fur trader Colin Robertson (1833) and geologist James Hector (1861) reflect the transformations in value of Indigenous material culture from the Enlightenment to the Victorian period in Britain, and this article examines the uses to which they were put. Exploring the motivations of the collectors, the article argues that collections researchers should look beyond these privileged ‘cultures of collecting’. Rather, official collectors could be productively used as entry points into the stories of those who brokered collections, whose contributions to knowledge of the social and cultural dynamics of colonialism have been overlooked.

Harlequin Ducks (<i>Histrionicus histrionicus</i>) Scavenge Sea Urchin Fragments from Foraging Sea Otters (<i>Enhydra lutris</i>)

Foraging animals may risk association with potential predators to obtain otherwise inaccessible prey. We observed this strategy in wintering Harlequin Ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus) scavenging fragments of Red Sea Urchins (Mesocentrotus franciscanus) from foraging Sea Otters (Enhydra lutris) that were re-occupying an area from which they had been ecologically absent since about 1850. Harlequin Ducks, like other sea ducks, have not previously been reported scavenging from other birds or mammals. In British columbia, Red Sea Urchins have reached large sizes and densities since the removal of Sea Otter predators by the marine fur trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. Observations of Sea Otters and Harlequin Ducks were made in 4 areas, spanning a time gradient of Sea Otter occupation from 1 to 5 years. During 3 months of observations (December 2013 – February 2014), Harlequin Ducks were associated with foraging Sea Otters only at sites that were recently occupied by Sea Otters (≤ 2 months), where the proportion of urchins in Sea Otter diets was highest and where the ducks acquired urchin fragments from foraging Sea Otters. We suggest that Sea Otters re-occupying their historic range and consuming predominantly large Red Sea Urchins provide a temporarily available prey subsidy for Harlequin Ducks. Our observations document a novel effect of Sea Otters providing important prey supplementation to a marine bird when foraging in urchin-rich habitats, contributing to the overall role of Sea Otters as a keystone species.

Narrating the Contested Space of Detroit’s River Rouge, 1600–2015

Abstract The River Rouge, which flows through Michigan into the Great Lakes at Detroit, has been a contested space, from the Mound Builders c. 1100 AD to the present. The river’s changing uses and meanings provide a microcosm of North American history, including Native Americans, French fur traders, the British, American settlers, small-scale industries, and Henry Ford’s largest factory. Narratives treat the river as a landscape, as a highway, as a natural resource, as raw material, as a minor detail, or as a threatened environment. The river has been part of a romantic view of pre-history, a heroic story of colonial conquest, a tale of democratic expansion into new land, an exemplary second creation in which unfinished nature is transformed into the world’s largest factory, a narrative of class warfare between workers and capitalists, a tale of the triumph of democracy over National Socialism in World War II, a tragic story of the exploitation of nature, and a recovery narrative in which the river is rescued from pollution and misuse.

Fantasies of Sovereignty: Deconstructing British and Canadian Claims to Ownership of the Historic North-West

Fantasies of Sovereignty: Deconstructing British and Canadian Claims to Ownership of the Historic North-West Adam Gaudry (bio) IN THE SETTLER-COLONIAL CONSCIOUSNESS of the nineteenth century, the origin of Canadian sovereignty in the historic North-West1 is the Hudson’s Bay Company’s transfer agreement with the Dominion of Canada in 1870. This transfer agreement was a vital step in Canada’s self-understanding as a nation a mari usque ad mare, from sea to sea. Negotiated in London under British law, the transfer paved the way for Canada to populate the region with its settlers and to act as the territory’s primary political authority. In exchange for transferring these rights, the Company was paid £300,000 and received a one-twentieth of the land of the “fertile belt” in this newly Canadian territory. All of this occurred without the involvement or consent of the Indigenous peoples who were still the numerical majority in the region. The transfer agreement presumed that British sovereignty could be asserted successfully through an act of imperial legislation half a world away, even if it conflicted with local proprietary claims. This claim reaffirmed the imperial logic of the day that Indigenous assertions of territoriality were secondary to European claims of sovereignty. Such a position has been roundly criticized,2 but has never been fully deconstructed in its connection to claims of Canadian sovereignty in the historic North-West. The purpose of this article is to unpack this basic claim—that the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) possessed legitimate ownership of the North-West and could sell it to Canada in 1870 without the involvement of Indigenous peoples who lived there. Contrary to the claims of European empires, Indigenous peoples in the North-West exercised more or less unconstrained political authority over most of their lands both before and after 1870. However, throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, British and Canadian institutions mobilized a complex array of legal arguments to claim possession of huge expanses of territory they “discovered” but did not control. For the most part, Canadian political institutions have traced their ownership of the North-West to the Hudson’s Bay Company transfer in 1870, which is rooted in the problematic logic of the Doctrine of Discovery. Therefore, this [End Page 46] article shows that at the heart of Canadian claims to ownership of Indigenous lands in the North-West lies an impractical mythology that, in the words of John Borrows, allowed the Crown to secure legal control of Indigenous lands through “raw assertion.”3 In demonstrating this point, I critically analyze five major public political events that position the Hudson’s Bay Company transfer agreement as the foundation of Canada’s 1870 assertion of sovereignty over the North-West. These events include: (1) the British Crown’s initial discovery claim at Hudson Bay; (2) the Hudson’s Bay Company Charter of 1670; (3) the Selkirk Grant of 1811 and Treaty of 1817; (4) Canada’s North-West discovery via New France; and (5) the HBC transfer agreement in 1869. This article demonstrates that Canada’s political claims to ownership over the North-West lay in problematic claims of sovereignty made by British and Canadian explorers, politicians, and businessmen, using language of discovery and sovereignty to obscure Indigenous governance already in practice. These claims are further complicated as they are more assertively invoked at the moment of a settler-colonial transition in the North-West, and are bound up in the changing status of an Indigenous-centered fur trade economy with a new settler project that sought to displace Indigenous peoples from the land both conceptually and physically. In analyzing the theoretical underpinnings of these political articulations, I am less concerned with Indigenous responses to British and Canadian claims making (although there were many), or the historiography of interpreting such events, than I am in showing that Canada’s political claim to the North-West ultimately rests on what James Tully refers to as a hinge proposition. A hinge proposition is a foundational assumption that is “relatively immune to direct criticism” because it is part of the “background norms” used by political actors to understand their political community, and thus...

Tribal Jurisdiction - A Historical Bargain

The existing rhetoric surrounding tribal civil jurisdiction over non-Indians often leaves out the historical foundations to that jurisdiction. This article compares the tribal economies of the 18th and 19th centuries with the current environment of gaming and economic development on tribal lands. Though non-Indians and nonmembers occasionally object to tribal jurisdiction, the long history of tribal governance and economic regulation demonstrates that nonmembers have received and continue to receive the benefit of a bargain that places them under considerable tribal regulation in exchange for access to tribal markets. Through a detailed survey of treaties, tribal statutes, and federal laws covering pre-1970’s tribal economic regulation, this article reveals that non-Indians have continually consented to tribal jurisdiction to access these tribal markets, making outliers of the non-Indians attempting to access tribal markets without consenting to tribal market regulations. Analyzing the laws surrounding the federal and tribal licensing of Indian traders; the Great Lakes fur trade; the marriage laws of the Five Civilized Tribes; and the procedures established for dealing with intruders on Indian lands in the 18th and 19th centuries demonstrates the vast historical underpinnings of the current efforts to retain civil jurisdiction over non-Indians.

The Blue Flower and the Account Book

This essay, a revised version of the August 2015 talk, examines the story of two mixed-blood women, indigenous and Anglo American, who lived in the fur trade North American West. The essay examines a racial category, mixed blood or “half-breed” and considers the challenges for people who lived in and used that category in the nineteenth century. The essay illuminates the challenges of using different kinds of personal records to understand how these nineteenth-century women might have thought about identity, a word they never would have used.

Купеческая переписка как источник изучения проблем развития пушной торговли крупным капиталом в Северо-Восточной Сибири во второй половине XIX - начале XX в.

Купеческая переписка как источник изучения проблем развития пушной торговли крупным капиталом в Северо-Восточной Сибири во второй половине XIX - начале XX в.

Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People. By Michel Hogue.

Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People . David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History. By Michel Hogue. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xi + 328 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $32.95, paper.) This is an important and useful book, exhaustively researched and well written. Michel Hogue has produced a fine study of the Plains Metis in their homelands, which became partitioned by the U.S.-Canada border. Rooted largely in the old North West Company and the Canadian-based fur trade, this growing population of Indigenous and European descent had come to dominate trade and buffalo hunting in the Red River region and beyond through the mid-nineteenth century. Closely linked through ancestry and kinship to numerous other … jennifer{at}professorsbrown.com

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

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...

We’re Going to Run This City: Winnipeg’s Political Left after the General Strike by Stefan Epp-Koop

Reviewed by: We’re Going to Run This City: Winnipeg’s Political Left after the General Strike by Stefan Epp-Koop George Melnyk We’re Going to Run This City: Winnipeg’s Political Left after the General Strike. By Stefan Epp-Koop. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015. ix + 197 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 cad/ $27.95 usd, paper. Winnipeg is western Canada’s oldest city. It is also the region’s most fabled urban center because of its association with insurrectionary and left-wing events. Some of these events predate incorporation (1873)—the Seven Oaks Massacre of 1816 in which fur traders and settlers clashed and 1869 when Louis Riel and the Métis declared a provisional government that led to the formation of the province of Manitoba shortly thereafter. In 1919 the city experienced a general strike that was broken by the military and the police. It was that strike that provided an impetus for the city’s labor movement to work hard on electoral representation in municipal politics. Epp-Koop’s book is a serious and detailed study of the post-strike period in Winnipeg’s municipal politics, extending into the 1930s. The author concludes that the battles between left and right, the working class and the elite, resulted in a “deeply divided” city. The divisions were not only class-based, they were also ethnic. While Winnipeg did not have the racial divisions that developed in American urban centers, it did share some of the attributes of the new cities formed in the Great Plains. These cities experienced rapid population growth fueled by settlers and immigrants, rampant real estate speculation, and labor exploitation associated with railroad expansion into the West. The study of how these class divisions played out in Winnipeg becomes a reference for understanding similar phenomenon in other cities of the region. In the period between 1920 and 1940 two political parties came to represent the left in Winnipeg—the Independent Labour Party (ilp), which had a moderate social democratic ideology based in English socialism, and the Communist Party of Canada (cpc), which favored a robust proletarian agenda promoted by the Russian Revolution. Both parties vied for voters in Ward 3, whose demographic was solidly working class and ethnic. Eventually ilp candidates were able to win the mayoralty race and a plurality on city council with the aid of cpc representatives. But the results in terms of social change and economic benefits for workers were modest. Nevertheless, the continued presence of the left on city council helped define urban politics for decades. Epp-Koop is a good writer and his narrative is both analytical and persuasive. His portrayal of the personalities who dominated the left in Winnipeg is engaging, while his discussion of municipal election issues is clear and precise. He makes use of numerous sources to bolster his argument. Clearly he is friendly [End Page 339] toward the left. However, the text would have benefited from more lines being drawn between what was happening in urban politics and what was going on provincially and federally for the left. This absence contributes to a certain narrowness. Second, the book would have made a contribution to urban studies rather than just political science by adding a descriptive sociological commentary on working-class life in Winnipeg that would have contextualized the policies advocated by elected representatives of the working class. [End Page 340] George Melnyk Department of Communication, Media, and Film University of Calgary Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Settler Colonial Strategies and Indigenous Resistance on the Great Lakes Lumber Frontier

Settler Colonial Strategies and Indigenous Resistance on the Great Lakes Lumber Frontier Theodore J. Karamanski (bio) Introduction The geographic and economic setting of the nineteenth century Upper Great Lakes region created unique challenges to American settler colonialism and encounters with the Indigenous people of this land of lakes and forests. Many Anishinaabeg bands responded creatively through the use of Christianity, education, and American law in an attempt to fortify their presence in the region. European Americans, who sought to appropriate the wealth of the Upper Midwest’s vast stands of hardwood and pine forests, only seldom needed to resort to guns to take control of the land. Instead of a war of conquest they entangled Anishinaabeg property owners in a bewildering legal and extralegal thicket that facilitated the plunder of the region’s most marketable resource. The initial phase of pine logging laid waste to Anishinaabeg property rights but left the Indigenous population remaining on their traditional lands. The ill treatment of Anishinaabeg landowners should have been a warning signal to policymakers in the 1880s seeking to reform national Indian policy through severalty. In his 2012 study of Great Lakes Indian history in the colonial and early national periods, historian Michael Witgen emphasizes the transregional society shared by the Anishinaabeg while at the same time documenting the “flexibility” and autonomy of action reserved to local bands. This essay is concerned with the Indigenous response to the lumber frontier’s variation of settler colonialism in the Upper Great Lakes region—the heartland [End Page 27] of the Anishinaabeg. The bulk of the essay, however, is anchored in northern Lower Michigan with the inclusion of some examples from northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi in Lower Michigan—sometimes known as the Three Fires Confederacy and who all embraced the native name Anishinaabeg—did not respond to the intrusion of lumbering in the same way as bands in other parts of the region. Yet the impact of the logging frontier on the Indigenous people was, with rare exceptions, strikingly similar.1 In the Wake of the “Middle Ground” What Richard White famously dubbed a “middle ground” of cooperation and cultural exchange that marked the Great Lakes frontier in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries endured after the conclusion of the second war with Great Britain. The cultural forms and economic relations of that earlier period of French and British regimes in the region only slowly waned over several decades under American suzerainty.2 The latent military power of the Indigenous people of the Great Lakes region, together with the lingering possibility of their receiving support from British Canada, inclined American officials and pioneer traders to follow for a time the previously established cultural norms. This process did not take place in the area south of Lakes Erie and Michigan. Here the old fur trade ways were swept away by a quickly rising tide of agricultural settlers. Yet during the 1820s the Anishinaabeg of the northern Great Lakes faced no such direct pressure and were allowed time in which they could take stock of their relations with the American state and to initiate strategies of resistance and accommodation. Several Anishinaabeg bands adopted bold strategies designed to both frustrate a United States government intent on carrying out the policy of Indian removal and to reposition their bands in the changing economy and politics of the antebellum era. The United States government had a two-faced policy toward Indigenous peoples. On one hand, it was committed to the taking of Indian land in order to accommodate its swelling agricultural population, yet it also claimed to be committed to “civilizing” Indians so they could eventually be incorporated into the general population. In 1821 Lewis Cass, the governor of the Michigan Territory (which then embraced the entirety of the Upper Great Lakes region), visited the people of the region. Accompanying him was Reverend Jedidiah Morse, who encouraged [End Page 28] the Indians to accept Christian missionaries with the threat “Civilization or ruin.” Faced with this pressure, two groups of Anishinaabeg, independent of each other, elected to embrace a path to “civilization,” but in such a way that it was under their control. These were the Potawatomi...

Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed America by Julie M. Fenster

Reviewed by: Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed America by Julie M. Fenster Francis X. Galán Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed America. By Julie M. Fenster. (New York: Crown Publishing, 2016. Pp. 422. Notes, bibliography, index.) In this lively work about the “men of Jefferson,” principally six explorers of the early American West, Julie Fenster presents an intimate portrait of colorful characters we thought we already knew. More importantly, the author deftly connects our understanding of international events leading [End Page 388] to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 with Thomas Jefferson’s prior role as secretary of state and his involvement in the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, two experiences that had merged his interest in westward expansion with purely scientific exploration. Fenster’s inclusion of Texas into this broader American narrative is refreshing: she raises some other powerful folks from the dead to dance the two-step around controversies while she paints a less romantic vision of the same explorers Jefferson encouraged during an era of tremendous optimism and fear. While readers may otherwise not see in various chapters any connections among Jefferson’s interest in the mustangs of Texas, navigation rights down the Mississippi to New Orleans, surveying the thirty-first parallel in West Florida, and the famous Lewis and Clark expedition’s search for the headwaters of the Missouri, Fenster shows in the opening chapter how these events followed from Jefferson’s concern over the Nootka Affair in Western Canada during the early 1790s. Jefferson feared Spain and Britain might go to war against each other over the fur trade in this region, with Britain possibly seizing Spanish Louisiana as a result. Jefferson’s advice to Washington’s cabinet expressing opposition to Britain and support for American neutrality, even if a bluff, marked the first victory of sorts for the diplomatic approach upon which Jefferson came to rely as president, especially after Napoleon’s rise to power in France. Fenster describes Spain’s rapprochement with Britain over coexistence in Nootka as a “tremor of weakness” for having “blinked” (12), but it also made Spain more determined to defend its claims in North America such as the border of Texas with Louisiana. Perhaps of all the explorers Fenster covers, her discussion of Thomas Freeman does justice to a man sold short for his important survey work on behalf of the nation to find the source of the Red River before his expedition was cut off by Spanish troops from Nacogdoches. Meanwhile, Fenster humanizes Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as well as Zebulon Pike: these men relied on grit in the outdoors and assistance from strangers, including Sacajawea for the former and the Spanish from New Mexico for the latter. Fenster brings to life other important power brokers such as the Kadohadacho chief Dehahuit in the Louisiana–Texas borderlands and the Mandan Indians in present North Dakota who could make or break nations and explorers. The author interestingly remarks that “Natchitoches was the Nootka of 1806” (332) in regards to continental ambitions: Pike could not return on time in support of Freeman whereas Pike’s mentor, General James Wilkinson, delayed support while under suspicion as a double agent for Spain. Fenster relies upon a strategic combination of printed primary and secondary sources, including important works by such scholars as Dan Flores, Colin Calloway, and F. Todd Smith to name a few. While her book [End Page 389] is intended for a general audience, her analysis is sound and written in a fast-moving style. Francis X. Galán Texas A&M University—San Antonio Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Reformed Deaconries As Providers Of Credit In Dutch Settlements, 1650–1700

New York History Summer / Fall 2015© 2015 by The New York State Historical Association 301 Reformed Deaconries As Providers Of Credit In Dutch Settlements, 1650–1700 Harm Zwarts1 When Europeans began establishing themselves in America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they tried, with varying degrees of success, to recreate the institutions and culture that they already knew. The Spanish brought their grapes, olives, and sheep, their religious orders and ancient labor systems like encomienda. The English and French brought their own plants and animals and their own political and religious institutions , modeled as closely as possible on institutions in Europe. All of them found that the American frontier sometimes required adaptations that they originally had not foreseen and probably would not have chosen freely.2 The Dutch of New Netherland were no exception. Though their colony was quite diverse, with many Germans, Huguenots, and Scandinavians, ownership and political power allowed them to shape colonial laws and traditions more than anyone else under their jurisdiction.3 In an effort to correct decades of historical neglect and Anglocentric misinterpretation about a place that was, in fact, far more than the simple trading post of some accounts, New Netherland scholars have in more recent years emphasized the successful recreation of Dutch institutions on the Hudson River and the survival of Dutch ideas and values. With its political posts 1. This article is based on archival work done during my research visit to the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2014. I wish to thank my host and supervisor, Dr. Thomas Max Safley, for his valuable guidance and support. I am also greatly indebted to the editors of this journal. Any faults in this article, however, are mine. 2. On the transplantation of culture, see, for example, David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford University Press, 1989); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On the difficulty and even impossibility of exact cultural recreation, see D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1999); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), chap. 2. 3. Only about half of the population came from the Dutch Republic. See David Steven Cohen, “How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?” New York History 62, no. 1 (Jan. 1981): 43–60. 302 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY and offices, its public Reformed Church, its familiar architecture and holidays , by 1664 the colony was in many respects a reflection of the so-called fatherland. Even the appointment of the city council in the colonial capital occurred on the same day as the same event in Amsterdam. In his broad overview of New Netherland, Jaap Jacobs reviews these features and events and concludes that the colony was “more Netherlandish than New.”4 In her work on the settlement of Beverwijk, Janny Venema recognizes many of the same connections and similarities between colony and fatherland, but she focuses instead on adjustment and change—what she calls “[c]ulture in a situation of contact.”5 She shows how settlers confronted conditions they had never dealt with before, how the economy was centered around the fur trade and how they interacted with Native Americans. Other unique features of American life included Indian-style diplomacy, severe winters, inflation, increased social mobility, and the use of furs and beads as currency. With the Dutch Republic as their “frame of reference,” colonists had to innovate and find solutions to challenges related to the unfamiliar environment and new native neighbors.6 This article builds on Jaap Jacobs and Janny Venema in particular by extending her comparison between poor relief in New Netherland and the Dutch Republic, analyzing the financial accounts and poor funds of Reformed deaconries in Beverwijk, Midwout, New Amersfoort, Breukelen, New Utrecht, and Schenectady.7 Though limited in scope, the deaconry records allow us to study and understand the management of funds. Moreover, they give us an opportunity to...

Plan Versus Execution: The “Ideal City” of New Amsterdam. Seventeenth-Century Netherlandic Town Planning in North America

New York History Summer / Fall 2015© 2015 by The New York State Historical Association 265 Plan Versus Execution: The “Ideal City” of New Amsterdam. Seventeenth-Century Netherlandic Town Planning in North America Jeroen van den Hurk Had Willem Verhulst executed the plans conveyed to him by the Dutch West India Company for New Amsterdam in 1625, it would have been one of the first planned cities in North America.1 Verhulst’s instructions retained principles of town planning that were then common in the Dutch Republic, based on the latest Italian theories. But for unknown reasons , he never fully executed them. Instead of becoming a well-planned, fortified settlement, New Amsterdam became a town reminiscent of old world cities like its namesake Amsterdam. The directors of the West India Company (WIC) did not show as much interest in their North American colony as they did in privateering and conquering Iberian forts and settlements in the South Atlantic. The WIC had obtained broad powers and authority in West Africa and America in its 1621 charter from the Dutch States General, following in the footsteps of the highly successful Dutch East India Company, which had received its own charter for the Asian sphere long before (1602). Because of an old, ongoing war with Spain (1568–1648), both organizations resorted quickly to violence, seizing many of their early colonial possessions from Spanish and Portuguese enemies. Still, the WIC’s charter did allow peaceful colonization as well, and in 1624 the company agreed to send the first permanent settlers to the territory known as New Netherland. Working with Native American counterparts, Dutch fur traders had been the only occasional visitors before then. Now with the first settlers New Netherland would begin the transition from fur trading outpost to genuine colony.2 1. The Spanish and the French began settling in North America by the second half of the sixteenth century, but none of their efforts seem as well documented as that of the Dutch West India Company. See John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), chaps. 2–3. 2. For the WIC, see Henk den Heijer, De Geschiedenis van de WIC (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2002). 266 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Willem Verhulst was “provisional director” of New Netherland (i.e., governor) from 1625 to 1626. The first colonists had disembarked on Noten Eylant (now called Governor’s Island) before he arrived, and some had even moved as far south as the Delaware River and as far north as presentday Albany, where the most intensive fur trading occurred. Though few in number, the colonists were scattered over hundreds of miles. Verhulst came with a second wave of people and livestock in 1625 and probably oversaw the original Dutch planting and construction on the southern shores of Manhattan Island.3 The written records that gradually emerged from these developments form a vast, rich source of information on colonial North America, shedding light on early New Netherland society and the colony’s material culture. The WIC’s instructions to Verhulst cover a wide range of issues. Of interest for this article are the specific guidelines for establishing a permanent settlement.4 The town planning approach and procedures found in Verhulst’s instructions were not unique to the WIC; they stemmed from fifteenthcentury Italian innovations that the Dutch had since adopted and developed for their own ends. More specifically, the company seems to have drawn on Spain’s Laws of the Indies and the work of a Flemish mathematician and engineer named Simon Stevin (1548–1620). Established by the Spanish crown in 1573, the Laws of the Indies created uniform standards and procedures for planning colonial towns and their surrounding lands (among other purposes).5 Stevin’s work was not as narrowly “colonial” in scope, but one could in theory apply his ideas anywhere, including America. He envisioned the ideal city along the orthogonal lines of the Roman castrum (fort or encampment), combining defensive, commercial, and social elements. The WIC did not adopt the rectangular shape and orthogonal lines of Stevin’s plan for New Amsterdam. However, he did impact how the town...

From Treaty Peoples to Treaty Nation: A Road Map for All Canadians by Greg Poelzer, Ken S. Coates

Reviewed by: From Treaty Peoples to Treaty Nation: A Road Map for All Canadians by Greg Poelzer, Ken S. Coates Brenden W. Rensink From Treaty Peoples to Treaty Nation: A Road Map for All Canadians. By Greg Poelzer and Ken S. Coates. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015. vii + 324 pp. References and further reading, index. $37.95 cloth. To understand the Great Plains as a region from the ground up, one should start, arguably, with the environment: the soil, the plants and animals, mountains and rivers, geographies and climates—the things that define it as a place. Beyond that, a firm understanding of its indigenous peoples should rank next. Unfortunately, this is one of the most routinely overlooked, underresearched, and misunderstood aspects of Great Plains history, experience, and contemporary living. This is true both north and south of the United States–Canadian border. For the Canadian Great Plains, issues of aboriginal homelands, pre-and postcontact migrations, involvement in European economic enterprise such as the fur trade, and reactions to Euro-Canadian expansion, war-and treaty-making, and continued presence in the region are all deeply woven into the historical contexts that explain modern-day realities. The Canadian Prairie Provinces cannot be divorced from their aboriginal roots. Indeed, this goes for the whole of Canada. In this light, the contemporary state of affairs in Canada grapples with the histories of European–First Nations interactions, and persisting problems within the same. According to Greg Poelzer and Ken S. Coates, Canada is made of treaty peoples (both aboriginal and nonab-original) and should be a treaty nation. It is, however, struggling to be such. Surveying history and present, Poelzer and Coates attempt to explain the countless reasons for failures of Canada’s people to live up to its treaty-bound relationships. Their coverage is impressively broad and complex. This is not casual reading and not for the faint of heart. It asks Canadians of all background to rise above hundreds of years of intense betrayal, insult, violence, and disagreement in order to chart a path forward together. They offer three keys for reform: providing honor and status for aboriginal peoples in state and society; empowering aboriginal peoples in government; and expanding economic opportunity to give aboriginal peoples equal footing with other Canadians (xx). Divided into four parts, their text offers aboriginal and nonab-original perspectives on historical problems, current affairs, and possible futures, stories of success, and various policy ideas and regimes that could provide the framework [End Page 141] for further fruitful development. A fair amount of diversity is represented, in terms of geography and the wide difference in aboriginal experiences and current issues. One lacking perspective relevant to the Great Plains is the unique status of Métis peoples. A robust dialog with new scholarship by the likes of Chris Andersen (University of Alberta) or Adam Gaudry (University of Saskatchewan) would certainly enrich the debates raised by Poelzer and Coates. In the end, that is the greatest value of this volume. It seeks to force productive debate, not fruitless finger-pointing and rancor. Whether or not it succeeds in doing so for Canada remains to be seen. Whether the United States, including the many indigenous peoples in the Great Plains, takes notice and begins more meaningful discussions of Americans as “Treaty Peoples” and a “Treaty Nation” likewise remains unclear. As a region with strong indigenous history and presence, these are debates worth having—on both sides of the border. Brenden W. Rensink Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Brigham Young University Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Phantoms of the French Fur Trade: Twenty Men Who Worked in the Trade Between 1618 and 1758, vols. I, II, and III by Timothy J. Kent

Phantoms of the French Fur Trade: Twenty Men Who Worked in the Trade Between 1618 and 1758, vols. I, II, and III by Timothy J. Kent