Fur Trade: Resources Online

The Online Books Page is an index of e-text books available on the Internet and is hosted by the library of the University of Pennsylvania.

UBC Library's Open Collections include digital resources created and maintained by UBC Library including photos, books, newspapers, maps, videos, theses and more.

The HathiTrust Digital Library is home to millions of digitized books and publications, including information about the fur trade and the mountain men.

Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of books or individual stories in the public domain.

This Web Page is dedicated to the arts, skills and lore of the Mountain Man and is intended to be a resource for all aspects of life in the mountains and the men who lived there. The focus of the site is on the American Mountain Man from 1804 to 1840.

This website is an on-line Research Center devoted to the history, traditions, tools, and mode of living, of the trappers, explorers, and traders known as the Mountain Men

Watson describes the ethnic origins of the people who took part in the fur trade, how the land-based fur trade was structured, how the participants lived, and how the trade changed the landscape.

This richly illustrated journal features scholarship on all facets of the state’s history. It includes many articles about the fur trade.

The fur trade was based on pelts destined either for the luxury clothing market or for the felting industries, of which hatting was the most important. This was a transatlantic trade.

Revelstoke Museum and Archives

2022 Washington County Heritage Center.

Grand Portage was the interior depot of the Montreal North West Company (NWCo) from 1779-1802. It was during the 1790s that the NWCo. controlled over 75% of the fur market, surpassing the Hudson's Bay Company by four times.

2024 Green River Rendezvous
Museum of the Mountain Man, Pinedale, Wyoming

The Fur Trade's Influence on Emigrant Trails.
2021 Green River Rendezvous.
At the Museum of the Mountain Man, Pinedale, Wyoming.

Grand Forks County Historical Society in January 2023.

Michigan Library presentation

UNTIL well in the 19th century, the fur trade was the principal business on the Missouri River and its tributaries. For several centuries the traders on the frontier found a ready market for furs and skins both on the eastern seaboard and in Europe.
Reprinted from Nebraska History, Volume 42, Number 1, March, 1961.

A fine beaver hat was a considerable expense, and it was a sign of a certain social status to wear one, so it was limited mainly to gentlemen of the middling and wealthy classes.