The Fur Trade and the North Woods Environment

Wisconsin Wetlands Association Wetland Coffee Break livestream talk, on Zoom. RSVP for link.

media release: Histories of the fur trade typically focus on the economic rise and fall of the European fur market, intercultural connections forged between Indigenous people and Euro-Americans, or the wars between Native Nations due to economic participation and alliances. However, an important yet understudied aspect underlying all of those is the fur trade environment. Between 1630 and 1830, fur hunters exterminated more than 95 percent of the region’s beaver population. In this talk, Hayden Nelson will share how the historical overhunting of beavers substantially altered the forested wetlands around Lake Superior. He’ll also discuss the interconnected ways in which other animals responded to the decline of beaver.

Hayden L. Nelson is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Kansas, where he specializes in environmental and Indigenous history in the North American West. His dissertation, “The North Woods: An Environmental History from the Pleistocene to the Pyrocene,” investigates how both human and non-human actors interacted with and transformed the transnational forested region of the western Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi watersheds from the end of the Wisconsin glaciation to the beginnings of industrial logging. His work has been supported by the American Society for Environmental History, the Newberry Library, the United States Forest Service, and more.