It should probably be stated right up front, the fur trade both revolutionized the world for the natives involved, and completely fucked it up. The fur trade gave various native group access to European goods, such as wool blankets, metal tools, and firearms. Tasks which once took hours, such as heating water in a stone pot, took only minutes in the European made alternative. However, it was a double-edged sword. Contact with the Europeans also brought disease, alcohol, and a loss of a way of life. Europeans were careful to not share how the items they traded to the natives were made, making them entirely dependent upon trade to get them. As a result, as the beaver population was depleted, and the trade moved further west, villages were left in limbo, no longer to buy European goods, but knowledge of the old ways forgotten after generations of trading furs. Tribes either had to assimilate to a European way of doing things or move westward in an attempt to secure new sources of fur. The devastating Beaver Wars of the late seventeenth century, carried out by the Iroquois in the Midwest, are perhaps the most destructive example of this phenomenon, but it was not the only one.
The Ojibwe of the northern Great Lakes were an Algonquian people who first made contact with the French in 1640, becoming first a trader of beaver pelts, and then as the trade moved further west, a middleman between the French and other tribes. This arrangement at first worked well for both the Ojibwe and the French, especially when it came to fighting the Dutch, and later English, supported Iroquois. However, as time went on, the French traders increasingly saw the Ojibwe as an encumbrance, preferring to trade directly with the tribes trapping the beaver, especially as an increasing number of independent traders hit the scene, willing to travel deep into what they considered the wilderness, establishing trading posts as far west as Lake Winnipeg. The Ojibwe combated this in two ways. One was to strongly encourage traders to take Ojibwe wives, resulting in a significant amount of intermixing and the creation of what became known as the Metis people. The other was to move steadily westward, using their European firearms to kick the shit out of other tribes to guarantee the French had to work with the Ojibwe. As a result of these tactics, but the end of the seventeenth century they controlled a wide territory covering present day Ontario, Manitoba, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
The Ojibwe were but one reason for the French losing their dominance in the North American fur trade. Following the end of Queen Anne’s War in 1713, the British Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) regained from the French its Arctic trading posts which had been lost in 1697. Similar to the French, the British largely traded deeper into the interior with a series of intermediaries, but unlike the French, they seemed little concerned with cutting out their middlemen given the beaver supply was more plentiful in the more northern latitudes and the more direct connection ocean shipping significantly cut down on shipping costs. The primary trading partner of the English was the Cree, who similar to the Ojibwe were an Algonquian people who moved westward to better secure their role as middlemen, spilling out onto the Canadian prairies and using firearms to kick the shit out of any other native groups who got in their way.
As can be expected, eventually the Cree and Ojibwe came into direct competition with each other. However, rather than fighting, they instead joined with the Metis and various Iroquois speaking groups who had come west working with the French, creating what became known as the Iron Confederacy. This rather fucked over the French, who suddenly found the northern areas dominated by this new power, but it rather delighted the British given it fucked over the French. As a result, the French even more began to focus on areas further south. The Iron Confederacy quickly became the most powerful group on the Canadian Prairies, dominating the trade in European goods, pushing groups like the Sioux further south, and establishing strong ties with the Blackfoot, a Algonquian speaking people further west, who thanks to trading furs for firearms, were able to pushback against the expanding Shoshone to the south. However, that dominance came under threat in the second half of the eighteenth century.
By 1760, the heart of the beaver trade had begun to move north into the subarctic. Though still plentiful further south, the supplies controlled by the Iron Confederacy and their Blackfoot allies were coming from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at a not insignificant expense. In comparison, supplies controlled by the Chipewyan were near the coast with a myriad of waterways to aid in their transport to Hudson’s Bay. The Chipewyan, a Na-Dene people, lived in northern Manitoba, but as they enjoyed an influx of European goods, quickly spread westward along various rivers into the interior, eventually reaching the Great Slave Lake, assaulting other Na-Dene peoples as they went.
For their part, the Iron Confederacy did at times come into conflict with the Chipewyan, but largely dealt with the issue by diversifying their portfolio so to speak. Given the difficulties of living in more northern latitudes, food was a popular trade item between the British and Chipewyan. To take advantage of this demand, many of the Cree adjusted to a horse-based society, hunting buffalo and manufacturing pemmican, which they sold to the British. Unfortunately, the combination of this trade and the increasing number of tribes adopting horses and a buffalo hunting lifestyle, led to a depletion in the number of buffalo on the Canadian Prairies, which increasingly put the Iron Confederacy in conflict with various Plains tribes, including their old ally the Blackfoot, who in 1790 formed the Blackfoot Confederacy specifically to combat the power of the Iron Confederacy.
