America in World History
Week 4
Weekly Theme:
From Rivers to Oceans
Slaves, Horses, and Furs
Trade on the Frontiers
1700-1800
Western America: Rivers
to Oceans
Lecture: Pacific Coast Otter Pelts
to China:
The 2nd American Fur Trade
Lecture Objectives:
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Introduce the 18th/19th Century Pacific
Northwest-Hawaii-China Fur trade
Role of Pacific Rim and its native peoples in
American History
Western US history as multi-regional and
‘international’
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Westward ho?
or
eastern Pacific?
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Facsimile of Louisiana by Samuel Lewis from åAaron Arrowsmith and Samuel Lewis atlas: “A new and elegant general atlas, comprising
all the new discoveries to the present time …
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Figure 1: The Pacific Basin, including many of the islands and mainland ports that became active sites of international
trade in the early nineteenth century. Adapted from Arrell Morgan Gibson, Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier
(Albuquerque, 1993). Courtesy of University of New Mexico Press.
Russian expansion:
Vitus Bering 1741
Russian Fur Trade
• Promyshlenniki (Fur traders)
• Exploited Siberian labor
• Supplied by Tribute via use of Hostages and
Violence
• Methods applied to Aleuts
• Aleutian Population decreased: Violence and
Disease
• 20,000 to 2,000 (1800)
• Kodiak Island 1784, Fort Ross 1812
Voyages of Science & ‘Discovery’
Britain:
Cook
1768-1780
France:
La Perouse
1785-1788
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Spain:
Alejandro
Malaspina
1789-1794
USA
Lewis and Clark
1804-1806
Cook
China Trade; The Force of
Fashion
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sea otter (Enhydra lutris)
• Furs prized by Manchu
nobility.
• Fashionable as belts,
capes, trim on silk
robes. Fur as badge of
distinction?
• ‘soft gold’.
• Otter Pelts brought by
Cook Expedition worth
$120 each in China
1779
Pacific-Bound Yankee Traders
• Cook accounts
published
1783/1784
• Columbia
Rediviva
embarking
from Boston
1787 and in
Pacific NW
• By 1800, 100
US ships
anchored in
Canton
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Figure 4: By the 1820s, Alta California was a central part of trading networks throughout the
eastern Pacific Basin and across the ocean to Canton. This map shows the frequency of
different destinations based on ships that stopped in Alta California. Adapted from Gibson,
Yankees in Paradise. Courtesy of University of New Mexico Press.
The Raincoast:Nootka Sound
• Tlingit, Haida,
Tsimshian, Nootka,
Kwakiutl, Chinook
• Trade networks
coastal and interior.
• Maquinna’s Potlatch
1803:
200 muskets, 200
yards cloth, 100
shirts, 100 looking
glasses,
7 barrels of
gunpowder
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Fashionable Furs= $
$= Fashion/Utility
Tlingit Armor vest of caribou skin
covered with Chinese coins
Hawaii: The Pacific’s “Great
Caravansary”
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•
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•
•
Center of Northwest-Canton Fur
trade
Supply nexus
Kamehameha and Hawaiian
Arms Race: Islands united in
1810.
1806- 15 vessels, including threemasters, brigs, and cutters
1808- more than 30 ships, most
under 40 tons, built in Hawaii
Suggested Readings
 Alan Taylor, American Colonies (Chapter 19, ‘The
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Pacific 1760-1820’).
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History
(Chapter 6, ‘The Fur Trade’).
Colin Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native
American West Before Lewis and Clark (pp. 395-415).
Wade Graham, “Traffick According to Their Own
Caprice: trade and biological exchange in the making of
the Pacific World, 1766-1825”
David Igler, “Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the
Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770–1850” American Historical
Review 109 (June 2004): 693-719.
Presented by the University of
California Santa Cruz America in
World History Group
Sample Lecture prepared by:
Natale Zappia
with
Anders Otterness