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currency
used
Beaver Pelts
favorite
trade goods
wool blankets
cloth
beads
metal goods
fire
water
guns
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trade goods of the fur trade
Life seems simplified when you are traveling through the
wilderness under your own power. The colder it gets, the more you realize
that a warm place to sleep, a hot meal, and good conversation are the
simple pleasures that often get whisked aside in the hustle and bustle
of modern day life. You wake up in a heated house, run into the bathroom,
flush the toilet, turn on the hot water and take a nice hot shower. Then
run down stairs and grab your favorite breakfast treat of Coco Puffs or
Raisin Bran before hopping in the car and getting wisked off to school
or work.
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When trade goods started to become available
traditional birch bark baskets slowly lost out to metal and now
plastic baskets and containers. Now very few native people know
how to make baskets.
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In contrast to the life Eric and I lead while on the trail,
your life is quite easy in some ways, but more difficult in others. For
example, every evening we have to tromp through the woods to find our
fire wood. Then we have to haul it back to camp, saw it into 16 inch pieces,
and split it with an axe. This alone takes about 30 minutes every day.
On the other hand you probably don't even think about how your house is
heated, it just is, but you have to pay for your heat, our is free!
Click on photo to enlarge
Furs were not the only thing that the voyageurs were interested
in. Wild rice was often traded along with birch bark for making
canoe
s. This fall Eric and I found a lot of wild rice along our
canoe
route.
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Trade goods that where brought into the interior during the fur
trade made the lives of the native people easier in some ways and
harder in other. Guns, cloth, metal pots and knives, all made life
easier. However, at the same time life got more complicated for
the native people. Instead of trapping beaver to make a blanket
of beaver fur. They were trapping beaver to trade for a wool blanket
or traps which they could use to trap more animals. Like most things
the fur trade and the trade goods that came with it had positive
and negative effects of the Boreal Forest
and it human inhabitants.
Can you make a list of 5 positive and 5 negative effects that you
think the fur trade brought about?
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The Wilderness Classroom Organization
4605 Grand Ave.
Western Springs, IL 60558
(630) 204-0420
info@wildernessclassroom.com
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