Eric Jay Dolin, the author of Fur, Fortune and Empire, the Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, sat down with the Frontier Traveler to discuss the impact of the fur trade on the history of America.
FT: After writing Leviathan, did you see a similarity between the plight of the whale and the plight of the beaver?
EJD: Yes, it’s fundamentally the same issue, that of humans seeking to profit from nature, and what happens when there are no restraints whatsoever on human activity. Whale and beaver populations plummeted because there was money to be made, and the way to make it was by killing the animals and rendering from them useful products – useful to humans, that is.
Making money, of course, is a great goal, but the point is that when that is the only goal, and there are many people 
competing for the same resource with nothing to check or regulate their activities, then almost inevitably the “Tragedy of the Commons” ensues. The good news is that the populations of beaver and many whale species have come back from their historic lows, and are doing fairly well, and in some areas, exceptionally well.
FT: How did you get interested in the fur trade?
EJD: I know the exact moment the idea for this book occurred. It was in the spring of 2007, while I was reading a book about the Founding of New England. The author wrote that “The Bible and the beaver were the two mainstays of” the Plymouth Colony in its early years. I understood the reference to the Bible, but I had no idea why beavers were thrown into the mix.
Intrigued, I read more, and soon the reference to beavers made sense. For more than a decade after their arrival in America, the Pilgrims’ main source of income had come from the sale of beaver pelts. Thus, the beaver was critical to the colony’s survival. This discovery was a surprise to me. What else, I wondered, didn’t I know about the American fur trade?
My curiosity piqued, I went to my local library and started reading about the fur trade. And within a couple of days, I realized that I could use the history of the fur trade to tell the broader and equally fascinating story of how America evolved into a transcontinental nation. I was hooked. [Click to read more]
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