*Includes pictures
*Includes excerpts of contemporary accounts
*Includes a bibliography for further reading
Though the importance of hats is easy to overlook, it was deadly serious in more ways than one, impacting the beavers and birds used to make fashionable hats, the environment of the region, and the people fighting over the resources. Beaver hats put the Dutch, British, and French in conflict, and later the Americans and Canadians. Plumed women's hats were considerably less important historically, but they had a huge ecological impact. The beaver is a crucial species that once had an immense impact on the environment around it, while the short era concerning the plume trade for women's hats drove a number of bird species to near-extinction. Indeed, several species have never recovered their numbers. The end product was fashionable men's and women's hats, sold primarily in Europe and the United States, but from raw materials to finished products, these hats linked tribal peoples, traders, hunters, trappers, merchants, and soldiers. Whether it crossed their minds or not, countless men and women in London and Paris were linked to the North American wilderness and all the violence it entailed.
The fur trade had its tensions, but for many years, traders and natives worked out their own systems, times, and traditions, allowing many different groups to interact and even compete without issues that led to war. Though native groups sometimes found themselves in conflicts based on long-standing rivalries or relations with the Europeans, most of the fur traders, the trappers, the Indians, and Hudson's Bay Company officials lived peaceably. The great amount of distance from one another in this land of millions of miles likely helped to alleviate tensions. When a new vision for the Hudson's Bay Company came about, one where settlers, not itinerants, would be responsible for the colony, the rules changed.
In time, the Hudson's Bay Company began to operate like a virtual empire within an empire, and it held an almost absolute monopoly on trade across most of British North America. From the 1780s onwards, however, it faced vigorous competition from a new rival in the form of the North West Company of Montreal. Blocked out of the most lucrative fur regions of British North America, the North West Company established itself in the Pacific Northwest and pushed aggressively westward, creating the first European settlements and outposts among the native tribes of the Columbia territory. In part, President Jefferson's objective in sponsoring the Lewis and Clark Expedition was to find a way to direct this growing trade into the United States, rather than north into British territory or west across the ocean. As Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis, the North West Company was already exploring New Caledonia, comprising most of modern-day British Columbia. None of this was formal British territory, of course, but along with most of the coast above the 42nd Parallel, it formed part of Britain's claim, and the companies active therein tended to reinforce this fact.
From the other direction came the first significant figure representing American commerce, John Jacob Astor, a brash German immigrant destined to become the wealthiest man in America. In addition to carefully building his companies, Astor watched the competition with a keen eye and learned a great deal from the establishment of the North West Company. The personnel of the various fur companies in the New World often kept close company. In the unpopulated wild, they depended on one another as protection against isolation and even collaborated in some circumstances. However, Astor wanted a monopoly on the Pacific Northwest, where all trade with the Indians could be carried out through one company.