This chapter focuses on the development and advance of the arctic fur trade to the year 1914: the decline of the shore whaling industry and the rise of the market for white fox furs; the beginning of the dispersal of trapping families along the coast; the importance of the Cape Smythe Whaling and Trading Company at Barrow, Alaska; and the activities of H. Liebes and Company, furriers of San Francisco.
This chapter recounts the difficulties that trappers and traders faced in the 1930s: low fur prices, poor fur harvests, the closure of trading posts, and very difficult ice conditions during the shipping season.
This chapter outlines the efforts of the Soviet authorities to change the lifeways of the Indigenous peoples (the Chukchi and Yupik) by re-locating them, re-educating them, forcing them to work in collectives for state-owned industries, and requiring them to sell their furs to the state at set prices.
This chapter examines the rise in the number of trading posts and the population dispersal that took place in Northern Alaska in response to the quest for white fox pelts, the price of which rose throughout the 1920s. It also discusses the loss of the schooners Arctic and Lady Kindersley.
This chapter delineates the Hudson’s Bay Company’s efforts to achieve monopoly control of the fur trade and the efforts of Captain C. T. Pedersen to prevent the HBC from achieving it.
This chapter depicts the growth and development of the fur trade during the 1920s in Western Arctic Canada: its swift eastward expansion (as far as King William Island), and the rivalries that developed among several trading companies, particularly the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Klengenberg family, and the Canalaska Company.
This chapter traces the development of the arctic marine fur trade in the greater Bering Strait region (including the Chukchi Peninsula and Northwestern Alaska) from the founding of the gold rush town of Nome in 1899 until 1914. This includes the rise of the “mosquito fleet” of small trading schooners that wintered in the North and worked throughout the region.
This chapter recounts the brief history of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trading post at the nexus of the Western Arctic and Eastern Arctic shipping routes. Difficult ice conditions forced the company to relocate the post farther south; nevertheless the post’s short existence serves as a paradigm for the larger story of the rise and decline of the arctic fur trade.
This chapter describes the chaos and disruptions that overtook the Chukchi and Yupik peoples during the Russian Civil War, which culminated with the Soviet takeover of the peninsula in 1923 and was followed by the seizure of trading posts and foreign trading vessels and the confiscation of traders’ supplies and money.
This chapter describes the practical techniques, skills, and business realities involved in the capture, manufacture, and marketing of white fox pelts, all of which affected the lives of northern trapping families.
