Craters of the Moon Historic Context Statements

Close Encounters: The Fur Trade in the Craters of the Moon Region, 1820-1856:
SUMMARY

Between 1818 and 1856, the fur trade was born and ran its course in the Snake River country. American and British interests competed with each other for a share of the trade which had political as well as economic dimensions. For entrepreneurial and expansionist minded Americans, the fur trade posed both the possibility of profits and the addition of new territory to a young nation. For the more powerful British interests, represented by the Hudson's Bay Company, itself an imperial force, the fur trade posed similar yet different possibilities. Wanting more to extract beaver for profits than to expand British territory, the Company efficiently and effectively stripped the Snake country of furs, dominated the trade, and slowed but did not stop American advances. The Hudson's Bay Company, a major force in the history of the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest, employed the brigade system to carry out trade in the Snake River region. This system proved to be a highly effective and innovative trade practice; it began operation in 1818 under Donald Mackenzie and continued under the leadership of Alexander Ross, Peter Skene Ogden, and John Work until 1832. The brigades blazed travel routes through the Sawtooth and Salmon River mountains north of the plain and across the plain itself. Their experiences crossing this country, especially the desert east of the Craters country, suggested an almost universal aversion to the lava landscape. It possessed no valuable resources for the fur trade, and traversing it endangered human lives, hence better to avoid the region than travel through it.

Similarly, American trappers such as Wyeth and Bonneville found the country to be visually unappealing and physically dangerous. Wyeth, though he erected Fort Hall in 1834, failed to create a successful trade business, and likewise Bonneville showed no ability as a trapper. Though they each had their shortcomings as businessmen, their lack of success can be largely attributed to the domination of the Hudson's Bay Company.

The fur trade peaked in the mid-1830s for both British and American interests with the decline in beaver populations in the region. Changing fashions in hats, from beaver to silk, also contributed to this decline, as did international affairs, such as the Oregon Compromise of 1846. Taking over Fort Hall and Fort Boise, the Hudson's Bay Company maintained a presence in the region until the mid-1850s, when it abandoned both forts in 1855 and 1856, closing the chapter on the fur trade era.

By association and accident rather than intent, the Craters country came into contact with the fur trade. Mackenzie initiated the first brigade travel near the lava territory in 1819-1820, and successive brigades under the leadership of Ross, Ogden, and Work came within the vicinity of the volcanic region through 1830, yet none penetrated it. That distinction belonged to an American Fur Company party which most likely stumbled across a portion of the Great Rift far to the south of the present monument in 1830. Nevertheless, the group's misadventure suggests why other fur parties avoided the region and instead opted to travel the difficult yet proven route between the Big Lost and Snake rivers. These travels suggest that trappers only came near and into the Craters country when compelled to by market forces. Without a tightening web of competition, it seems unlikely that the American Fur Company party, for example, would have attempted a short cut across the lava flows. The observations of the three buttes -- Big Southern and Twin Buttes -- also suggests that landforms which served as important travel markers possessed value for the fur trade, another reason why trapping companies avoided and rarely mentioned the relatively flat lava terrain of the Craters country. Moreover, the most poignant description of what is today Craters of the Moon came from Bonneville around 1834; he avoided the region because it was both treacherous to travel and devoid of any valuable resources.

Here, as in the Snake country, the fur trade peaked in the mid-1830s and left a record of visual experiences and physical encounters with the country near Craters of the Moon, a legacy that expanded geographical knowledge of that surrounding territory and generated a sense of why fur trappers shunned the lava flows of the Great Rift. Although the fur trade subsided near Craters of the Moon, avoidance of its rugged terrain continued as travel over brigade routes was taken over by overland migrants in the 1840s.