As fur traders were driven across northern North America by economic
motivations, the landscape over which they plied their trade was
punctuated by sound: shouting, singing, dancing, gunpowder, rattles,
jingles, drums, fiddles, and - very occasionally - bagpipes. Fur trade
interactions were, in a word, noisy. Daniel Laxer unearths traces of
music, performance, and other intangible cultural phenomena long since
silenced, allowing us to hear the fur trade for the first time.
Listening to the Fur Trade uses the written record, oral history, and
material culture to reveal histories of sound and music in an era before
sound recording. The trading post was a noisy nexus, populated by a
polyglot crowd of highly mobile people from different national,
linguistic, religious, cultural, and class backgrounds. They found ways
to interact every time they met, and facilitating material interests and
survival went beyond the simple exchange of goods. Trust and good
relations often entailed gift-giving: reciprocity was performed with
dances, songs, and firearm salutes. Indigenous protocols of ceremony and
treaty-making were widely adopted by fur traders, who supplied materials
and technologies that sometimes changed how these ceremonies sounded.
Within trading companies, masters and servants were on opposite ends of
the social ladder but shared songs in the canoes and lively dances
during the long winters at the trading posts. While the fur trade was
propelled by economic and political interests, Listening to the Fur
Trade uncovers the songs and ceremonies of First Nations people, the
paddling songs of the voyageurs, and the fiddle music and step-dancing
at the trading posts that provided its pulse.
