The vast commercial system that linked Indigenous hunters and middlemen across North America to European markets through the exchange of furs — above all beaver — for manufactured goods. For two centuries it was a central engine of colonial expansion, ecological change, and Indigenous transformation, built on Indigenous knowledge and diplomacy as much as European capital.
For most of the 1600s and 1700s, a hat made European men feel powerful. The hat was made of beaver felt, and getting the beaver meant crossing a continent. The people who made that crossing possible were not the European companies with royal charters. They were the Huron-Wendat, the Cree, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee — nations who knew the rivers, controlled access, bargained hard, and shaped the trade's terms for longer than most accounts admit.