In 1661, the celebrated English diarist Samuel Pepys spent £4.25, more than 1% of his annual income, on a hat. This was no ordinary piece of headgear but a prized and prestigious "beaver."
From Pepys's day until the early 19th century, hats made from processed beaver fur were the crowning glory of Europe's kings, generals and men of fashion, coveted as status symbols. These were boom years for hatters and trappers, although, as Alan Axelrod points out in "A Savage Empire," they were less auspicious for North America's largest rodent. By the time of the American Revolution, the buck-toothed beaver had been hunted to near-extinction in its eastern habitat. And it was not just wildlife that suffered to satisfy the insatiable consumer demand; as rival groups of incoming colonists and Native Americans alike fought over the trade and its profits, the human cost was also high.
From medieval times, Europeans had obtained furs from Russia and Scandinavia. American pelts began coming on the market during the 16th century—decades before the French, English and Dutch established permanent settlements and trading posts on the continent—after Basque fishermen chasing cod off Newfoundland's Grand Banks bartered with local Indians for beaver robes to help fend off the numbing Atlantic chill. Back home, these second-hand garments were eagerly bought by hat makers who knew that the simple act of wearing them had already begun the process by which fur could be transformed into high-quality hats—human sweat helps to break down the tough fibers. A market was born.
While nothing like as arduous or dangerous as trapping beavers, hat making was not without its own hazards. Before it could be formed into impressively brimmed and crowned hats, the soft "beaver fluff" scraped from the pelts had to be steeped in highly toxic salts of mercury. Prolonged exposure to the fumes released when the material was steamed for final shaping had dire effects on the nervous system, hence the expression "mad as a hatter."
Such snippets suggest that "A Savage Empire" is a book along the lines of Mark Kurlansky's best seller "Cod," with historical and ecological strands woven into a full portrait of the North American fur trade. But the focus is instead on human conflict. Mr. Axelrod contends that the enmities and alliances fostered as settlers, trappers and their Indian contacts struggled to dominate the lucrative business during the mid-17th century set in motion the course of war that ultimately led to an independent American republic.
The book's early chapters certainly demonstrate fur's role in fomenting strife. By the time that Pepys acquired his pricey hat, competition for pelts had triggered a ferocious sequence of "Beaver Wars" in which the Mohawks—one of the original Five Nations of the Iroquois League spread across modern upstate New York—ruthlessly plundered their tribal neighbors, hijacking furs to swap for prized European goods like spun cloth, iron hatchets and liquor.
This "blitzkrieg," as Mr. Axelrod terms it, was all the more devastating because the Mohawks had been armed with guns by their Dutch trading partners in Albany. Their victims included the Hurons, fur trade "middlemen" who supplied the French in Canada with the thicker—and therefore more valuable—pelts from the colder north. Escalating tribal warfare generated a nightmarish cycle of violence in which those not slain outright or spared for adoption were ritually tortured to death and communally cannibalized—the flesh consumed for reasons that baffle anthropologists (the best guess is that it was a means of absorbing an enemy's courage).
A Savage Empire
By Alan Axelrod
Thomas Dunne Books, 336 pages, $25.99
When the story moves forward into the 18th century, and the fur trade further and further west as stocks are depleted, a direct link between fur trading and widespread frontier warfare becomes much harder to establish. Far more was increasingly at stake—for Indians and colonists alike. France had traditionally used the fur trade to cultivate militarily useful tribal allies, yet its "invasion" of the Ohio Valley in the 1750s was not about monopolizing supplies of beaver pelts but about penning English colonists east of the Appalachians: Imperial territorial friction, not competition for furs, kindled the pivotal French and Indian War that eliminated France as a power broker in North America. "A Savage Empire's" central thesis, that fur fueled nation-shaping conflict, becomes weaker with subsequent wars. The American colonists who defied the British Empire and the Indian tribes that struggled to stem white settlement beyond the Ohio River were fighting for nothing less than independence.
Mr. Axelrod makes some more specific factual errors as well. The 400 firearms that the Dutch supplied to the Mohawks in 1648 with undeniably bloody consequences were not "rifles" but smoothbore muskets: It would be another century before rifles became common among either whites or Indians on the frontier. Maj. James Grant was not killed when the French and their Indian allies defeated his raiding party outside Fort Duquesne (modern Pittsburgh) in 1758: Grant survived to boast in 1775 that he could march the length of the rebellious American colonies with just 5,000 redcoats, a statement that proved optimistic to say the least.
And even though Mr. Axelrod's emphasis upon recounting successive wars dictates an overwhelmingly narrative approach, he sometimes becomes sidetracked. He gives over four chapters, for example, to the efforts of the young George Washington to counter French expansion in 1753-54. Such digressions over much-trodden ground leave scant space to explore more interesting facets of this specific story—for instance, how the demand for furs prompted Indians to replace traditional hunting, where prey was afforded a spiritual respect, with indiscriminate slaughter; or how the vagaries of European fashion granted the hard-pressed beaver a belated reprieve in the first decades of the 19th century.
Likewise, more might have been said about the lifestyles of the tough, independent voyageurs and coureurs de bois (literally "woods runners") of French Canada. Their feats of endurance and exploration anticipated the trappers who ranged the Rockies during the fur trade's Far West phase of the 1830s and '40s. These trappers are mentioned in a brief coda to Mr. Axelrod's chronicle of colonial and revolutionary warfare. Yet in their quest for increasingly elusive pelts, the semi-legendary "Mountain Men" blazed the westward trails for wagon trains that surely shaped America as profoundly as any frontier war.—Mr. Brumwell's books include "White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery and Vengeance in Colonial America."