The Fur Trade, Two Centuries Before the Farmers Came

Before there was a Wisconsin, before there was a United States, before the word 'Midwest' had been invented, there was the fur trade. And the fur trade ran on relationships.

French-Canadian voyageurs paddled the interior waterways of this continent beginning in the sixteen hundreds, trading manufactured goods, iron kettles, wool blankets, glass beads, firearms, for beaver pelts that were made into felt hats sold to the fashion-conscious cities of Europe. Wisconsin sat at the center of the Great Lakes network, a place where the Fox-Wisconsin waterway allowed a canoe loaded with trade goods to pass from Green Bay on Lake Michigan to Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi River with only a single overland portage, about a mile and a half to two miles through the marsh near present-day Portage.

The fur trade was not an extraction imposed on Indigenous peoples. It was a set of exchanges that Native nations chose and shaped for their own purposes. Menominee and Ho-Chunk traders brought pelts to French posts; they received goods they incorporated into their material culture, their ceremonies, and their economies. Mixed-heritage families formed across a generation of these exchanges: the métis communities of Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, and the Fox River valley were neither fully European nor fully Native American. They were something new, specific to this place and this history.

The trade lasted longer here than many Americans realize. The American Fur Company, John Jacob Astor's enterprise, dominated the Great Lakes trade into the eighteen thirties. By then the beaver was largely trapped out in the Great Lakes region and fashion was shifting toward silk hats, but the networks of relationship, the trading families, the bilingual communities, the mixed marriages, persisted in Wisconsin longer than the commerce that had created them. The town names are evidence: Prairie du Chien, Fond du Lac, Eau Claire. The landscape holds the vocabulary of people who came here to trade and stayed.