The Fur Trade
The river route was integral to the continuing fur trade between St. Louis and the Indian Country that provided American furs, which had been going on since the early nineteenth century. J.J. Roe & Co. consistently took goods upriver, and brought furs and other extractive materials back down the river. On one trip in 1865, the ship unloaded in St. Louis with 260 packs of furs.
The trip from St. Louis to this new Montana Territory took about two months and was often dangerous, due to encounters with the local Sioux Indians, but the profits were well worth the hardships. J.J. Roe entered the market with other merchants, businessmen and salesmen in this period, all earning their profits from supplying the demands of the settlers for consumable goods. This was an incredibly profitable economic niche on the frontier.
Read more about this topic: Steamboat Bertrand
Famous quotes containing the words fur and/or trade:
“The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: the true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.”
—Joseph Epstein (b. 1937)
“I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)