I recently learned a little about the fur trade in the early and mid 19th Century United States reading Walter Johnson's masterful The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.
A search using the book's title in our general search box yields a link to the book itself along with full text reviews of it. I find that the general search box is particularly helpful for just this purpose, seeing if a book might be useful to you by looking directly at it, in the case of e-books we own, and/or by scanning reviews.
From reading Johnson, I learned that the fur trade was one of the largest commodity markets in the world at the time, and that it was fueled in large part by a booming demand for beaver caps in Europe. That led European-settlers, in their hunger for profits, to violate limits on trapping set by Native American tribes. By 1840 the western beaver were pushed to the edge of extinction (pgs. 30 - 31).
I had never considered 19th Century Europeans with beaver caps, never mind what that might mean for the environmental history of the North American continent.
Questions naturally came to mind from this implication. For instance: what were the ecological reverberations in the West of this depletion of beaver? How did the affected tribes respond? My curiosity led me to flip to Johnson's endnotes for his sources on the fur trade, and there I found a title that would interest me were I inspired to read further: The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807 - 1840: a geographical synthesis by David Wishart. I found the book in our catalog, available at NYU and easily shipped to one of our libraries in a couple of days by logging in to the catalog, and requesting it. I scrolled down to see the subject headings for the book, which are hyperlinked so that you are able to see everything in the catalog with the same subject heading. One seemed particularly relevant: Fur trade -- West (U.S.) -- History. Clicking on it yielded 10 hits. All looked interesting, and the most recent book, from 2020, we own electronically in our JStor collection: Peter Fidler: from York Factory to the Rocky Mountains. This book tracks the fate of one surveyor for the Hudson's Bay Company, and includes excerpts from his journals.
I then searched with a broader iteration of the subject heading, substituting North America for West (U.S.) in order to find a book about the trade from the perspective of Native American people.
All of this is a great example of how reading can lead to interest in topics one never imagined existed. That is why I often recommend to students that they read a good amount before considering a research topic since you might be led down a path that is more fascinating to you than your original topic, and for which there is a better amount of literature. We librarians are available through many avenues for research help. We are here to help!
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