About two weeks ago I was queried by Michael Flanagan about the 17th Century
fur trade/Indian trade in southern and southwestern Virginia.

I'm really more of a Tidewater economic historian, but I promised him that I
would give this some thought and try to come up with some source material.

I haven't been able to come up with any real quantitative evidence of how
much fur, or what value of fur that the English might have acquired from the
native Americans in the 1650-1675 period, but there is lots of evidence that
such a trade was going on.  In fact Nathaniel Bacon the Rebel, in
partnership with William Byrd I, took a license to trade with the Indians
from Governor Berkeley in the fall of 1675.  Under this agreement they were
to pay Berkeley 800 pounds of beaver pelts for the first year and 600 pounds
of beaver for each subsequent year they traded. (see Bacon to Berkeley, 18
September 1675, Coventry Manuscripts, 77:6 -- of which there is a microfilm
copy at LC and Colonial Williamsburg, and probably other places as well). Of
course the "rebellion" of the following spring prevented them from using the
license, but Byrd went on to make quite a bit of money in the Indian trade.

I'm not sure what the value of beaver was at that point in time, but I don't
think that in individual pelt weighed more than a pound or two -- so we're
talking about at least 500 pelts, just to pay for the license.  If you
assume that the fee was perhaps 5-10% of what they expected to gain in their
trading, we're talking about 5-10,000 skins to be traded just by one
partnership.  I don't know how many traders there were, but they obviously
thought there was something worthwhile to be earned there.

I have prepared a short (2 page) bibliography of primary and secondary
source on exploration and promotion of southern/southwestern Virginia
1650-1670.  I would be happy to send the PDF version of it to anyone who
would care to request it.  Unfortunately, the list server won't let me post
it with this message.

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Peter V. Bergstrom, Ph.D.
Information Systems Manager
Chestnut Health Systems: Lighthouse Institute
Webmaster: http://www.chestnut.org

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