This book came out a year ago. It’s taken me more than a year to consolidate my thoughts into a post. While I requested permission to reprint images and quotes, I never heard back, so the only artistry I can show are the covers of Gawboy’s work.
The back cover of Carl Gawboy’s recent book.
“Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History” is an important first: The fur trade from an Ojibwe point-of-view in a recent book by Carl Gawboy, Ojibwe artist and author. Our previous understanding of that era stems from old journals or trade records — kept by Europeans — so his insights need to be heard. Gawboy relates it with 800 drawings, compassion and a wry sense of humor! For a short intro, check this YouTube video. (Or click on it at the end of this post.)
So much new stuff that I felt a jolt on nearly every page! As I read and re-read, he clarified points, introduced new information, challenged ideas and raised questions.
Here are 6 major discoveries. At the end, more than a dozen additional jolts to my awareness (maybe yours too?).
1. Flawed beliefs (and images) of a fur trade post
There is much misleading information in C.W. Jeffries’ painting.
The most in-demand trade good was — (drum roll) — cloth and blankets! Not guns, not alcohol, not iron pots, not beads — though each of those were important. (Can you find fabric? A blanket is hiding on the top shelf and another behind the trader’s head!) I’ve written about this before.
While a gun was an expensive item, it wasn’t the most wanted, or even the most useful (see #2, below). Men usually traded for tobacco and the tools to trap and hunt — knife, axe, shot, gunpowder, caps, ice chisels, fish hooks, traps.
After that, Gawboy said, WOMEN traded for everything else the household needed — clothing, blankets, pots and other items. They were active careful customers, but this picture shows her almost cowering, instead of participating actively. Alexander Henry knew women were the key:
“I went to meet a band of Indians returning from hunting beaver and fought several battles with the women to get their furs from them. I was vexed at having been obligated to fight with the women.” ~ Alexander Henry, 1804
Pelt inaccuracies:They weren’t rectangular (like those in the foreground). The mystery pelt the trader is considering—no way!
Gawboy adds that because interiors were dark and candles were expensive, trading was conducted outdoors, with the mood of a combined family reunion, county fair and yard sale. And conducted in several Native languages plus French, English and Scots.
2. About the “superiority” of guns
Detail from a popular trade gun
Guns were useful tools, but not the fabulous do-all that we might have imagined. Shooting the popular North West trade gun required 13 steps, like: cleaning the pan, pouring powder in the pan and into the barrel, tamping it, adding a lead ball and tamping it, adding wadding and tamping that, all before cocking the trigger into position. One shot and the game animal — if it wasn’t hit — was alerted and ran to safety. Not so with a quiet arrow.
Gawboy includes a 2-page spread comparing the processes. He quotes George Catlin, who observed that hunters could shoot 15-20 arrows per minute.
3. The myth of hunter-gatherer
This enclosure, similar to those that protected gardens, was made to snare rabbits. (Forts Folle Avoine, Danbury, WI)
You’d be wrong if you believed that Ojibwe found food only by hunting and gathering. Certainly they hunted game, fished and gathered berries and wild rice. But they also were agriculturalists, growing corn (to supply themselves and the fur trade) and pumpkins. Gawboy said the Ojibwe discovered natural greenhouse areas (micro-climates like Garden River, near Sault Ste. Marie) to plant their gardens and developed short-season varieties for beans and squash, thereby widening the limits of agriculture.
They placed garden areas away from their villages, so visitors didn’t necessarily see them. And fenced them (to limit critters eating them?).
In a presentation introducing his book, he noted that the Great Lakes culture obtained half of its calories from agricultural products and half from berries, rice and game.
4. Consensus democracy
European cultures were based on obedience to a single over-all person (pope, king, bishop, manor lord, sheriff, military officer — and women obeyed men). American government officials wanting to settle a treaty looked for a single Native leader to make similar decisions regarding all aspects of their tribe. They didn’t realize that a tribal chief was only responsible for particular aspects (canoe-making, blueberry-ing, deer hunting, ricing, war …) which caused the Americans confusion and frustration.
We like to think of our country as being the first to offer/encourage freedom to its people. But before Europeans arrived, the Ojibwe already practiced strong consensus democracy. Ojibwe women had freedoms to divorce, own property and make business deals 250 years before US laws allowed those rights to “white” women. Big jolt.
5. Clans strengthened tribal life
The beaver was one of the five original clans of the Ojibwe, focused on sustaining the tribe with food, pelts and scent glands.
Clans provide its members a purpose in life that serves the larger community. Originally the 5 clans were: loon, crane, deer, fish and bear. That has expanded to about 30 clans which encourage various aspects of native culture and life. For example:
- Leadership: crane, loon, hawk, brant
- Sustenance: beaver, moose, caribou
- Medicine: turtle, otter, merman (water spirit)
- Learning: fish, sturgeon, whitefish
- Defense: bear, wolf, lynx (For example, Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, is a member of the wolf clan.)
They even planned for future children:
“When the French married the Ojibwe women they were adopted into the marten clan, so that the children could have a clan to follow.” ~ Edward Benton-Benai, 1979
6. What happened next?
Gawboy devotes the last quarter of the book to Ojibwe’s catastrophic experience after the fur trade, which ended in the 1850s when treaties forced all Indians onto reservations. Chapter 7 focuses on the children of the fur trade and Chapter 8 describes the series of broken promises. Though tribes tried to negotiate treaties in good faith, the land they once held was “treatied” away from them. It was intentional: read what Thomas Jefferson wrote.
Money owed to traders was taken directly from Native annuity payments, so tribes basically received nothing for their land, while traders and others got rich. In less than a generation, Gawboy said, the Ojibwe went from freedom to serfdom, from self-reliance to dependence, from prosperity to poverty.
To complicate their lives even more, fur trade marriages were declared illegitimate, Indian religions were banned. It was illegal for Indians to own guns, and the people who invented the canoe were removed from what became the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. How cruel.
Here’s Minnesota’s example:
The original Leech Lake Reservation was that big green chunk of reservation land. Gawboy says that Ojibwe only own a tiny percentage of that land, like pepper sprinkled on the paper. And rarely on lakes or rivers. (Map USDA, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
In 1850, Territorial Governor Alexander Ramsey changed the location of the Oct. 25 annuity payments (cash, food and trade goods) from Madeline Island reservation to Sandy Lake in Minnesota Territory). This required Ojibwe to walk 250 miles in late autumn — and cross the difficult swampy Savannah portage.
Payment wasn’t there when they arrived, nor was food available. While they waited, they were given spoiled food and 150 died of food poisoning. Finally, on Dec. 2, three days’ worth of food finally arrived, but no money. The Ojibwe walked 250 miles back home in deep snow; more died on that journey and even more over the winter from lack of food.
By delaying their annuity payments until the waterways froze, Gov. Ramsey forced the Ojibwe into westward relocation — to make land available for settlers from Wisconsin and Michigan.
The Allotment Act of 1890 then broke up reservations previously guaranteed by treaty. That meant dividing communally-owned land into parcels that were supposedly large enough to support a family farm — regardless of whether it was good arable land.
The remaining reservation land? Grabbed by lumber companies, white homesteaders and other non-native people.
While Minnesota maps show the outlines of various reservations, the actual Indian-owned land is drastically smaller — and rarely on the lakes and rivers where they once abounded, all due to allotments, land grabs, cheating and legislation. Gawboy includes a map of actual land owned by Ojibwe — it looks like pepper was sprinkled on the map instead of big chunks of land like the early reservations.
Gawboy included many more gems that I’m pondering:
- A primer on birchbark and canoe building: How different uses (wigwam, makuk, canoe) took advantage of the direction of the grain or the cambium or paper sides. Gawboy’s grandmother “Shay-way-be-bay-seake” was in charge when building canoes!
Thought-provoking book — a must read!
- The number of Algonquian languages similar to Ojibwe, and the nearby ones that are different (Mandan, Lakota, Nakota, Dakota, Ho-Chunk and Iroquois).
- Though a maple leaf adorns the Canadian flag, wouldn’t the birch leaf honor the fur trade history more?
- Fur trade jokes — sprinkled throughout!
- Blood quantum — the percent of native blood — as the rule for tribal enrollment.
- Fur post stockade walls weren’t built to keep the Indians out — the traders instead wanted to attract them. At the Sandy Lake post, Gawboy says, the builders feared rival fur companies.
- The actual names of Ojibwe women (not their French or English names), who were rarely mentioned in fur trade journals
- The Ojibwe “lock” on a wigwam door — two crossed sticks. Worked also for portage loads yet to be picked up.
- Fur trade fashion: The construction of capotes (blanket coats) and strap dresses
- How Ojibwe communities changed throughout the year, due to harvesting fish, game, rice, maple sugar, etc.
- How smallpox and white men’s milk — alcohol — affected tribes.
- Sheep, and the other animal the fur traded depended on (and enormous cost of cloth and metal goods to the English peasants)
- Louis Riel and the Métis — a whole chapter.
- A phenomenal bibliography
Final Thoughts
- Read my novels from a too-young newbie’s view of the fur trade: Book 1: “Waters Like the Sky”; Book 2: “Treacherous Waters”and ”Book 3: “Uncharted Waters” all in paper and ebook form.
- Subscribe to this blog and read posts as they are published!
- For what I’m researching or quirky discoveries, visit me on Facebook or Instagram (@nlnlnraj): I love your comments.
- Book me as a speaker.
- Ask your library, local school, gift shop to buy copies.
- Be a voyageur for an hour—come to one of my presentations.
Source:
“Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History” written and illustrated by Carl Gawboy (AnimikiiMazina’iganan: Thunderbird Press, Cloquet, Minnesota, 2025) 194 pages, $29.99.
And the YouTube introduction to “Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History”
What I’m reading:
- “George Drouillard: Hunter and Interpreter for Lewis and Clark & Fur Trader, 1807-1810” by M.O. Skarsten. University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, Nebraska, and London, 2005).
- “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest” by Suzanne Simard. Vintage Books, division of Penguin Random House (New York, 2021)
