Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/133

Rh undertakings, international contests, beginnings of steamboat navigation, and settlement, overlap each other, and each topic compels us in a measure to anticipate its successors. This is especially true of the topic treated of in this chapter.

The fur-trade was an important factor in the eras of discovery both by land and by sea, in the Indian wars and in the era of settlement, while the strife of nations for the possession of the land of Oregon is almost a history of the fur companies and their international policies. Remembering this synthetic nature of these features of our history, we shall endeavour, with as little repetition as possible, to present a coherent picture of that great era of the fur-traders.

Without doubt one of the earliest uses to which man has put the lower animals is that of clothing his body in their captured skins. The acquisition of furs has been a special feature of the colder climes. It is obviously also a feature of discovery and conquest, for it is the wilderness only which yields any considerable number of fur-producing animals. Thus navigation, commerce, discovery, invention, economics, finally international wars and policies, have been rooted to a large degree in this primal business. The fur-hunters have held the hunters of gold and precious stones and spicery a close race in the rank of world movers. Indeed it may well be questioned whether results of greater moment to humanity have not proceeded from the quest for furs than from that for gold.

The Spaniards expended their energies in the gold and silver hunt in Mexico and Peru and annihilated the races of those lands in their pitiless rapacity. The other great exploring nations of the sixteenth century,