cloth for fur
I have been reading alot about the trade of Stroud Red Cloth through Hudson Bay company, East India Company, Levant Company and the Royal African Company.
These cloths, famous as the cloth of scarlet military uniform, were bought for trade by both the East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The company was set up to trade for beaver pelts with the Cree and other American Indian peoples near James Bay , and continued as a trading and exploration company into the nineteenth century. In the fur trade years the company faced stiff competition from French fur traders and later the North West Company with which it subsequently merged in 1821.
American Indian trappers traded fur pelts for guns, axes, knives and predominantly woollen textiles, including blankets. By the eighteenth century the Gloucestershire broadcloths, often known as ‘strouds’ dominated the fur trade inventories in both bulk and value. Cloth, especially strouds, had been an important trade good since the seventeenth century and had even been exchanged for land and people:
‘in 1716 “Indian Peggy” appeared before the Commissioner of Trade with a “French man” purchased by her brother and given to her. The man had come dearly, costing her brother “a gun, a white Duffield match coat, two broadcloth match coats, a cutlass and some powder and paint”. Peggy was willing to exchange her hostage for the gun, and “the value of the rest of the goods might be paid her in strouds‘
a rug (purchased in N.America) which is made from Coyote Fur and Stroud Red owned by a local resident and photographed recently . I find it a strange looking object but a really interesting combination of both aspects of trade: fur and Stroud Red Cloth
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Strouds were traded for Beaver Fur to be made into top hats . Its interesting how one cultures fashion can affect anothers livelihood..with the invention of the silk top hat and colapse of the hunting ecomomy there was much hardship among the American Indian community.
learn a bit about the process of beaver felt HERE
January 22nd, 2010 at 04:11 pm
The fact that the red cloth became a traded and barter item, indeed as you have already highlighted almost a currency, is fascinating – a powerful message! But some of it in N America started as ‘trophies’ - small pieces cut from the jackets of captured/killed British soldiers and then attached to or worked into artifacts and garments as a decoration, to show off a Native American’s ‘victory’ (much the same as scalps, but there was more of it and it would be more easily divided up!). If you have time on a London visit, have a look at the splendid North American galleries in British Museum (upstairs, near the back of the building) - everywhere you glance you will see examples!