Background on The Fur Trade in Minnesota

Fashion: Driving Force Behind Minnesota's Earliest European Settlement

Few Minnesotans may realize it, but the driving force behind the earliest European exploration and settlement of their region was not the quest to establish a northwest route to the Orient or conquer and settle new lands. It was, instead, demand for a hat.

The "beaver," as the hat was called, topped the heads of fashionable Europeans for some 200 years. The hat ranged in style from the tri-cornered fashion of the late 1700s to the stovepipe top hat of the 1800s. Believed to have originated in Russia in the 1500s, the beaver is said to have become popular when Swedish soldiers, engaged in the Thirty Years War from 1618 - 1648, sported a wide-brimmed, reportedly romantic style.

The beaver hat was fashioned of felt - the favorite raw material for which was the soft "underfur" or "wool" of the animal. While rabbit and muskrat furs were also used, the beaver's "wool," with its tiny interlocking barbs, was preferred for its ability to stand up well to weather and wear.

With Europe's beaver populations largely depleted through overhunting, hatters looked to the New World and its bounteous supply of fur-bearing animals. To meet the demand, French, British and Scottish traders, bearing iron tools, kettles, wool blankets and other supplies to exchange for furs harvested by Native Americans, established trading posts westward from Hudson Bay. Two companies, the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company, came to dominate the fur trade from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s.

As competition for furs intensified, posts sprang up farther west. One of the largest in the late 1700s was at Grand Portage on Minnesota's Lake Superior shore. The North West Company Fur Post near Pine City, now a historic site operated by the Minnesota Historical Society, was one of several smaller trading posts from which furs were shipped north to bigger posts, such as Grand Portage and Fort William located farther north on land that would become Canada.

The traders, however, were not hunters. They relied on Native Americans to trap the animals and prepare the pelts. In exchange for the furs, traders provided Native Americans with goods, from axes to beads, from Europe and around the world. Communities that developed around the fur trade were multi-cultural and interdependent. Each party had a specific role to play and all benefited from the collective effort. (More on the multi-cultural aspects of the fur trade in a backgrounder on "practical partnerships.")

Fashion's fickleness ended the fur trade. By the 1840s, the silk hat had replaced the "beaver" as the fashion statement of the day.