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The French era to 1859
The trade: For a century and a half before there was a city to count anything, the animal population of the confluence country was counted in bales. The Indiana Magazine of History's early article "Wild Animals of Indiana" describes the traffic out of this region in sequence: French pirogues carrying "untold thousands of bales of skins," then the Mackinaw Company, the American Fur Company and John Jacob Astor's houses drawing "vast quantities of beaver, otter and other less valuable peltries" to Detroit and Canada by way of the Wabash — and then, in the 1820s, the Fort Wayne houses of G. W. and W. G. Ewing, established at Fort Wayne and Logansport, running agencies across the state. Fort Wayne was not a bystander to the fur trade; it was one of its counting houses.
The invoice: The same article prints a surviving 1859 account book of A. B. Cole of Noblesville, an agent buying from local trappers for the Ewing fur company of Fort Wayne, and one invoice of furs sold to Ewing, Walker & Co. totaling $3,679.87. Its lesson is in the proportions: raccoon, deer, and mink skins were "considerably in excess of any other kind" — the beaver, once the trade's whole reason, no longer led the ledger even in the trade's own books. Beaver at that period, the article notes, had led all other pelts in value at $6 to $10 a skin, and the pressure that price put on a slow-breeding animal is the mechanism of everything that follows in this section.
The scale, one trader's book: For the sheer weight of the early kill, the state record offers the shipment books of the Vincennes fur trader Francis Vigo, whose records for 1777–87 include 2,669 bear hides — a southern Indiana figure, printed here as the trade's scale and not as an Allen County count. The point the ledger makes locally is narrower: by the time Fort Wayne had newspapers and county histories, the animals that filled the first accounts were already being subtracted by a trade that had been running for generations.
Sources:
- "Wild Animals of Indiana," Indiana Magazine of History (the Ewing houses at Fort Wayne; the A. B. Cole account book and the 1859 Ewing, Walker & Co. invoice; beaver prices), via ScholarWorks, Indiana University (scholarworks.iu.edu).
- Indiana Department of Natural Resources, "Black Bear" (the Francis Vigo shipment records, 1777–87), in.gov.