ABSTRACT: This article presents documentary evidence supporting a fundamental update of the masculine persona the fur trader carries in both the popular and the scholarly imagination. It demonstrates that, certainly in colonial New York, fur transactions were part of the norm for people of both sexes. Much of the ethnohistorical literature on intercultural economic exchanges in colonial North America has focused on native men trading with Euro-American merchants. Only as of late, scholarship has signaled ways in which indigenous women participated in the expanding colonial American market for furs. This breaks away from a longstanding paradigm of the two sexes operating within largely segregated social, economic, and political spheres. The older approach depicted a gendered division of labor between aboriginal men who controlled the ‘forest’ (hunting-warfarediplomacy-trade) and women who were confined to the ‘village clearings’ (household-agriculture). This article offers further challenges to the classic polarization, and it demonstrates that native women regularly travelled on fur trade business which took them far beyond their villages. It discusses their visits to Dutch-speaking merchants in the American colonial town of Albany and the rural Hudson Valley county of Ulster.
This article is based on the analysis of data from two nearly contemporaneous account books of the fur trade in colonial New York: Evert Wendell’s “Account Book of the Fur Trade in Albany, 1695–1726,” on deposit at the New-York Historical Society, and an anonymous ledger cataloged as “Account Book, 1711–1729,” in the holdings of the New York Public Library. The latter contains a section of some 110 pages, recording trade with Munsee natives between 1712 and 1732.2 Our study produces a profile of hitherto-unknown clusters of Iroquoian and Algonquian women in the fur trade in the colony of New York during the closing years of the seventeenth century and the first third of the eighteenth century. The ledgers reveal women serving in roles that suggest economic initiative, financial responsibility, and geographical mobility—qualities more typically assigned to males than to females in the traditional “forest versus clearings” polarization.
Our findings are based on tabulations of each separate appearance of native women in the account books of these Albany and Ulster County traders. Usually, such an account contained multiple transactions, often spread out through a number of years and regularly including exchanges between the trader and other, associated indigenous individuals. A woman may appear only once, trading on another individual’s account, or she can exhibit extended trading activities on an account of her own. With some regularity, they also traded for another native man or woman, having the associated debt or payment counted against their own balance. Our unit of measurement consists of each transaction that was recorded in the ledgers. The observations in this study are not based on the volume, price, or relative value of the articles and services acquired by individual native men and women. The value of purchases or debt remittances is recorded in the ledgers in a widely varying array of units of measurement, some of which were monetized, others not. Our tables and observations are based on counting numbers of transactions through all accounts.
By Waterman, Kees-Jan; Noel, Jan
York History, 2013, Vol.94(1-2), pp.40-58