CHAPTER II 



WHAT BROUGHT THE FUR MARKETS OF THE WORLD TO 



AMERICA? 



In three different places in the spring of 1920 there occurred 

 scenes that marked a complete shift in the current of a world trade. 

 These were the fur auctions of Montreal, New York and St. Louis. 



A hundred years ago, there used to float down the Ottawa and St. 

 Lawrence to Montreal, down the Mississippi and Missouri to St. 

 Louis, flotillas of canoes and flat-bottomed scows and York boats 

 loaded to the water line with peltries and manned by grizzled voy- 

 ageurs who hadn't seen a razor or a barber's shears for a year. In 

 Montreal, the fur brigade arrival was celebrated by a Fur Fair in 

 which every kind of firearm and gew-gaw was bartered with the 

 voyageur or trappers for the pelts from the North Country. By 

 fall, these peltries had been sorted and shipped by slow sail boat for 

 England, where they usually arrived about December. By spring, 

 they had been still more carefully sorted and dressed, and were now 

 sold to the world trade in a series of auctions, the most important 

 one being held in March or April. 



Down at St. Louis, there was no Fur Fair. The great Fur 

 Fairs of the Mississippi and Missouri were celebrated high up the 

 hinterland of the mountains in Pierre's Hole below the Three 

 Tetons, or in Ogden's Hole in Utah ; but the arrival of the boats and 

 canoes from the Up Country at the muddy flats of St. Louis was 

 celebrated noisily, bibulously and hilariously. The men of the 

 mountains with long hair tied back by twisted colored handkerchiefs, 

 or topped by coon caps, and dressed otherwise in buckskin from coat 



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