Beaver Wars

Or the European art and great efficiency in killing:

1689. Darkness was upon Huronia, and to the south and west.

Dutch and English wares arrived in New Netherlands’ ports by the bateaux full, but it was guns with thick butts and fitted with dog-lock cocks that clasped tight the amber and black sparking stones that the Mohawks wanted. Not the arquebuses sold to them an era before: the clumsy matchlocks needed a long cord that watered the eyes with the stink of vinegar when lit, and both ends smoking, and the glowing slow-match clenched in a serpentine arm suspended over the pan to make them shoot, if the ember ignited the priming. Flintlocks–forbidden to troops in France, but Compagnies franche de la Marines in Canada had them–cost more beaver, but the fancy guns killed with greater surety and at a good distance.

Sleek, long-barreled fowlers stocked to the muzzle in walnut, and bullet molds, black powder, and bar-lead–all bartered for heaps of plundered deer-skins; for stolen otter and beaver pelts; for booty of fisher, mink, fox, raccoon, and pine marten furs; for greasy bundles of ebony silk locks, the lank Huron scalps were very finely decorated, braided with strands of white and purple wampum, barleycorn beads, and porcupine quills, and capped with human parchment stained a dirty shade of burnt umber.

“The English have no sense,” declared a warrior of the longhouse, astonished at the spill of goods, his new sense of acquisition, and the power that it gave him. “They give us twenty knives like this for one Beaver skin.” But trader Robert Juet’s words evinced the classic European notion of these novel business dealings. “The people of the Countrie came flocking aboord and brought us . . . Bevers skinnes and Otters skinnes, which wee bought for Beades, Knives . . . Hatchets, and trifles.”

From Ted Franklin Belue. The Hunters of Kentucky. A Narrative History of America’s First Far West, 1750-1792. Stackpole Books, 2003, pp. 4-5

Belue gives credit for the Juet quote to Carolyn Gilman in Where Two Worlds Meet: The Great Lakes Indian Fur Trade published by the Minnesota Historical Society in 1982.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more loving description of a firearm. Or a scalp, for that matter.

Possibly related posts:

How Braddock marched into slaughter

The Business of Fancydancing

The Books Blog

James Nourse

A view of Dr. Thomas Walker

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.