Is there any information on the overland trade in Colonial America?

by Madgod1234

I've learned and read a lot about the triangular trade and the significance of naval trade in the New World. What did trade look like over-land among the colonies and Native American groups? Thank you!

amp1212

Short answer:

The most important trade in the colonial era between settlers/Europeans and native Americans was fur. There is a very large literature on fur trading.

Discussion:

The alpha and omega of trade with native Americans was fur. The scale was enormous undertaken by major enterprises like the Hudson's Bay Company.

This trade is of great historical importance -- it was one of the issues that lead to the American Revolution, as British authorities didn't have the same interests as American colonists in opening up lands to the West of the Appalachians for settlement. They were making plenty of money through fur trade with native Americans, and so didn't see westward expansion in the same light as the colonial Americans.

So there's a lot of information on this, and it's important to appreciate in order to understand the American Revolution, among other things. There have been extensive studies of the fur trade in Canada, the various colonies, the Northwest. The answer to "is there any information" is "yes, months and months of reading, if you're interested".

Sources:

Noble, Vergil E. “Excavating Fort Ouiatenon, A French Fur Trading Post.” Archaeology, vol. 35, no. 2, 1982, pp. 71–73.

Sage, Walter N. “Life at a Fur Trading Post in British Columbia a Century Ago.” The Washington Historical Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, 1934, pp. 11–22.

Journal of a Fur-Trading Expedition on the Upper Missouri 1812- 1813. By John C. Luttig, Clerk of the Missouri Fur Company. Edited by Stella Drumm. (St. Louis. Missouri Historical Society. 1920

Cool, Nolan M. “Pelts and Prosperity: The Fur Trade and the Mohawk Valley, 1730–1776.” New York History, vol. 97, no. 2, 2016, pp. 122–148.

Norton, The Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1686–1776 (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1974)

Ridner, Judith. “Relying of the ‘Saucy’ Men of the Backcountry: Middlemen and the Fur Trade in Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 129, no. 2, 2005, pp. 133–162.

Carlos, Ann M., and Elizabeth Hoffman. “The North American Fur Trade: Bargaining to a Joint Profit Maximum under Incomplete Information, 1804-1821.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 46, no. 4, 1986, pp. 967–986.

Haeger, John D. “Business Strategy and Practice in the Early Republic: John Jacob Astor and the American Fur Trade.” The Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2, 1988, pp. 183–202.

Arthur J. Ray and Donald B. Freeman. "Give Us Good Measure": An Economic Analysis of Relations Between the Indians and the Hudson's Bay Company Before 1763. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1978