American Fur Trade
Having found an apprentiship with a Scots merchant at New York, McTavish recognized the opportunities offered by the fur trade. By 1769, he was working for himself and in 1772 he went into partnership with William Edgar (1736-1820) at Detroit. In the Niagara Region, it was said he started trading in deerskins and muskrats, and only later became involved with the more valuable furs.
Over the next few years, McTavish prospered in the trading of furs, and in 1773, with a new partner, James Bannerman, he extended his operations to Grand Portage on Lake Superior. At that important fur trade rendezvous, while other American traders concentrated on the south and west, McTavish understood that he would have access to fur pelts that were found in much greater quantity and were of better quality in the colder climate north west of the Great Lakes.
Although at the time the Hudson's Bay Company controlled the prime north-westerly areas for fur trapping, there was still a relatively lucrative route from Montreal westward via the Ottawa River and out across Georgian Bay and the Great Lakes Region and into Manitoba. Most of the trade at Grand Portage went through Montreal.
In 1775–76, McTavish had the great fortune to winter at Detroit, well stocked with trade goods for the next season, he made an expedition with George McBeath. The American Continental Army occupied Montreal that winter, preventing the Montreal traders from getting their goods to Grand Portage in the summer of 1776. This enabled McTavish, with little competition, to obtain furs which he valued at £15,000 and took to England to sell in a high market.
Read more about this topic: Simon McTavish
Famous quotes containing the words american, fur and/or trade:
“The American people are doing their job today. They should be given a chance to show whether they wish to preserve the principles of individual and local responsibility and mutual self-help before they embark on what I believe to be a disastrous system. I feel sure they will succeed if given the opportunity.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does—but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you’ll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)