Reflections: Rise and fall of fur trade an all-too-familiar tale

Northern Illinois is the tail wagging the state economic dog these days, but it wasn’t always that way.

Two centuries ago, in 1818, when Illinois gained statehood (using a bit of chicanery that was a precursor to business as usual here ever since), population was concentrated in the southern part of the state. The only outposts of white settlement in northern Illinois were at Peoria, where a few French and Metis (French/Native American mixed) families lived, and at the small trading settlement around Fort Dearborn at the mouth of the Chicago River on Lake Michigan.

The U.S. Army’s Fort Dearborn garrison was very small, and the civilian settlement that meandered along the north and south forks of the Chicago River’s banks and lakeshore near the fort boasted a few fur traders, their families, and a few fur trade company employees.

In the northern Illinois of 1818, the fur trade was the most important economic activity, although it was becoming clearer each year that the supply of fur-bearing animals was sharply declining. Even so, the American Fur Company maintained a depot at the north end of the strategic and economically important Chicago portage, which linked Lake Michigan with the Illinois and Mississippi River systems.

Although the portage was vital, it was also undependable, in that its length could vary from nothing at all during flood conditions to up to 60 miles during the dry weather of late summer. Some of Chicago’s first non-fur traders made a business out of providing teams and wagons to haul fur company trade goods over the portage.

Each year, the American Fur Company sent brigades – large groups of Mackinac boats especially designed for the fur trade – from the company’s headquarters at Mackinac Island in northern Michigan down the western shore of the lake to Chicago and across the portage. From there, the brigades traveled down the Illinois River to gather furs in return for trade goods from the resident tribes. The tribal groups of the Potawatomi, Ottawa and Chippewa living along the Fox River in what is now Kendall County used this annual expedition as their major trading opportunity.

A surviving account of the American Fur Company’s 1818 expedition to the Illinois River country was probably typical of many similar annual expeditions during that era.

The Illinois River Brigade left American Fur Company headquarters on Mackinac Island in modern Michigan with 12 boats in the spring of 1818. The brigade was commanded by Antoine Deschamps, the company’s bourgeois – manager – of the trade in the Illinois River Valley.

After 20 days of travel down the lake, the brigade reached the Chicago River’s mouth on Lake Michigan. There a few days were spent repairing the boats, after which three additional days were taken to move the brigade’s cargo and boats over the portage from the headwaters of the Chicago River at Mud Lake to the DesPlaines River.

By then, summer had arrived and the DesPlaines River was low. As a result, it took the brigade another three weeks of hard traveling on the 70 or so miles south to the mouth of the Fox River near Starved Rock. There, the group traded with Indian bands from a wide area, including our Fox Valley.

The backbone of the fur trade, first conducted by monopolies granted by the French king and later by British and American companies, was the French Canadian voyageur. The small villages along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers in Canada produced the hardy boatmen needed to conduct the difficult and dangerous, but usually profitable, trade with the interior tribes. Because they served so many generations in the trade – the first French Canadian voyageurs visited the Illinois Country in the last quarter of the 17th century – their influence was huge, partly because many of the voyageurs who visited what was then the west country liked it and stayed.

By the time settlement began here in Kendall County in the late 1820s, the Metis descendants of French and Indian parents were involved in the trade throughout the Fox Valley. Peter Specie, for instance, was a well-known local character who welcomed the earliest settlers to Kendall County. Specie helped the first settlers break the prairies for the first farms and left his name behind on one of Oswego Township’s largest groves.

Vetal Vermet, another French Canadian trader, settled at Holderman’s Grove in what is now Kendall County’s Big Grove Township in 1828. Vermet apparently worked for the American Fur Company and often traveled between posts at Peoria and Detroit on business. He later married one of Ottawa pioneer Dr. David Walker’s daughters, Huldah, and settled with her on a claim at Holderman’s Grove in the southwest corner of Big Grove Township.

By that time, however, the fur trade in northern Illinois was rapidly drawing to a close. Over-trapping by Indians desperate to earn enough money for food and clothing and the intrusion of farms and domestic animals into formerly wild areas were spelling the local extinction of fur-bearers like beavers and mink.

Which was a common result of the fur trade. As early as the late 17th century, rich fur-bearers were hunted and trapped to extinction in eastern Canada, leading to a series of bloody wars between tribes as obtaining pelts became the justification and object of wars of extermination. Whole tribes were wiped out by other tribes, and by European and American armies that followed the trade.

With the area east of the Mississippi trapped out by the 1830s, the era of the Mountain Man began in the Rocky Mountains as the fur trade began moving into its endgame phase.

Man has never wanted to believe that a plentiful natural resource could simply be used up, although it happened again and again in the fur trade. It would be nice if we learned from past mistakes, but from the sounds of serious problems with sharply reduced commercial fishing catches and the disappearance of old-growth timber on which whole regions have relied, history just keeps repeating itself like an old 78 record with a bad scratch.

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