Fur, Fortune, and Empire

Tracing the rise and fall of the fur trade from the first Dutch encounters with American Indians in 1609 to the beginning of the conservation movement in the late nineteenth century, this book is the most compelling and comprehensive history of the American fur trade ever written.  In splendid detail, Eric Jay Dolin demonstrates how fur - as both an economic elixir and an agent of destruction - spurred the exploration and settlement of the vast American continent while alternately enriching and gravely damaging the lives of native Indian peoples.  Both meticulous and fascinating, this three-hundred-year narrative of the American experience has finally established the fur trade as a seminal force in creating the nation we are today.