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.It wasoften one of the Indians clan totems, along with the wolf and the bear.Indian lead-ers wore beaver skins as badges of high office, for Indians revered the beaver s cun-ning.The Micmacs thought that the beaver was smart enough to talk, but refused todo so out of sheer orneriness.The Ojibwas who lived in the Great Lakes area believedthat long ago beavers were people.The beaver, with its cousins the otter and the marten, was a symbol of an entirelydifferent kind to the European the mark of high fashion and elevated economicstatus.Dressed sable and ermine were part of aristocratic European costume, andfur robes, collars, and muffs graced men s and women s fashionable clothing.Asnative European fur supplies dwindled, Europeans looked elsewhere for pelts.Car-tier reported the extensive fur supplies of the Northeast; Gilbert confirmed the fact,and the rush was on.Beaver hats became the choice of elegant fops and sober merchants.The hat tookon all manner of shapes, from the floppy-brimmed, ostrich feather plumed hat forthe cavalier to the softer beribboned hat for gentlewomen.The Dutch favored a cocked beaver hat with both sides drawn up, much like the modern cowboy s Stet-son.The French preferred a conical beaver hat with a round brim.Under the inducement of European traders demand for pelts, Indians began tohunt the beaver to extinction.Hunting became a commercial exercise instead of aquasi-religious act.It may be that some Indians blamed the beaver for the epidemicdiseases the Europeans in fact had introduced, but this argument fails to explain whymost Indians continued to regard the beaver with respect.A different explanation for the change in Indian hunting ways is that Indians sim-ply wanted European trade goods.Although Europeans thought that Indians virtu-ally gave away valuable pelts for less expensive goods, Indians became enamoredwith European trade goods like firearms and ammunition for a variety of reasons,not the least of which was the Indians own ability to adapt European technologiesto Indian ends.For example, firearms and ammunition gave Indian buyers the ad-vantage over traditional enemies who did not have firearms.Indeed, with practice,Indians became far better shots with European firearms than were the Europeans.In return for the pelts, Indians also obtained European textiles, cooking utensils, RI VALS FOR THE NORTHLAND 117and tools.These were put to use in Indian fashion.For example, Indians wanted Eu-ropean long shirts, but not pants, for most Indians did not wear pants, but shirtscould be worn over Indian leggings.Iron cooking pots and tools lasted longer andretained heat better than Indian pottery and wooden ware.Iron pots could also bereworked into other useful tools.Indians accepted beads, mirrors, and other fash-ion items in trade because Indians, like Europeans, expressed their individualitythrough jewelry and other decorative baubles.Another vital part of the trade for both Indians and Europeans was distilled spir-its.Indians grew so fond of liquor that traders could ensure a steady supply of peltsonly so long as they could offer Indian trappers distilled beverages.Indians soon de-manded liquor not only in trade but as an inducement to come to the trading post inthe first place.But the image of the drunken and dangerous Indian is misplaced.In-dians rarely drank as heavily or as often as the Europeans with whom the Indianstraded.Equally rare, though much publicized, was the occasion when drinking ledto violence.Even then, it was the inebriated European who was as likely to start thefracas as the Indian.Still, there was a cruel irony to the introduction of alcohol into the trade, for it wasso much in demand among the Indians that they willingly impoverished themselvesto obtain it.Recognizing the demand among their own people, some Indians setthemselves up as middlemen in the trade, reselling alcohol to villages deeper in theinterior, where the traders did not go.Indian shamans and European missionariesinveighed against the alcohol trade, and over the years Europeans passed laws ban-ning liquor sales to Indians, with little effect.The French Return to CanadaBy the final decades of the 1500s, the French had fully grasped the implicationsof the idea of a trading empire.French fishing fleets, numbering from three hundredto four hundred vessels each year, traded regularly with Indians at the mouth of theSaint Lawrence and all along the Newfoundland coast.The mariners and the nativesexchanged knives, axes, pots, and clothing for furs.Indian groups so prized thesetrade goods that they began to battle one another for control of the coast.As well,European fishermen competed for access to the Indian trade goods.Some of thefishermen established seasonal camps on the islands at the mouth of the river andspent more time trading than fishing.If these sedentary arrangements could be made permanent, the French could mo-nopolize the trade, or so went the thinking of a French soldier, traveler, and mer-chant adventurer named Samuel de Champlain.Champlain was born to the sea, ina coastal town south of the Brittany peninsula.He served in the French army thatdrove the Spanish from France and was decorated for bravery.With his uncle, he thentraveled to the Caribbean, spending three years in Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and portsof call on the Spanish Main
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