I would love to have the information that you have offered.  I have
spent this winter and spring pretty much only on Southwestern Va as well
as the part of Virginia that is now southern Wv and the Eastern part of
Ky.  Pretty fascinating area.  Your time period is a little earlier than
what I have been reading, so I would be extremely interested in
broadening my research with a bit earlier information.  Thanks a
million!  Marsha in Wv

Peter Bergstrom wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> email:  [log in to unmask]
> Peter V. Bergstrom, Ph.D.
> Information Systems Manager
> Chestnut Health Systems: Lighthouse Institute
> Webmaster: http://www.chestnut.org
>
> email:  [log in to unmask]
>
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