Fur, Fortune and Empire -- The Epic History of the Fur Trade in American by Eric Jay Dolin, Norton '10, $29.95, 442 pages, ISBN #0393067106. Two groupings of glossy images -- one of color, one b&w -- plus b&w images sprinkled through text.
We conventionally think of the railroads as the world's first big business. But as author Eric Jay Dolin writes in his riveting new book, the fur trade, which began more than two centuries before the railroads, maybe did as much to transform America, with profound effects on the development of the colonies, settlement of the American West, and its relations with Native Americans.
In the early 1600s, explorer Henry Hudson countered American natives with an "abundance of provisions, skins, and furs," and a light went on in his head. From there, Dolin describes the establishment of the first trading posts by the Dutch East India Company to the dissolution of John Jacob Astor's vast American Fur Company to the near destruction of the buffalos.
The sponsors of the Mayflower voyage, Dolin reveals, intended to use the Pilgrims as a source of colonial profit, and by 1630, "the most highly developed enterprise in New England was the exportation of furs by the Pilgrims." But the trade taking place among American merchants and traders paled collectively beside French, Dutch, Swedish and English, who battled in no-holds-barred fashion to beat the competition.
Eric Jay Dolin's well-received Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America was chosen by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe as one of the best books of the year. Dolin lives in Marblehead.
