2 - Maneuvering through Centuries of Inter-Imperial Fur Trading and Gold Speculation in Woolson and Ruiz de Burton

Summary

In the opening of his history of John Jacob Astor's fur company titled Astoria; Or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836), Washington Irving declares the centrality of two commodities to American economic success: fur and gold. He writes:

Two leading objects of commercial gain have given birth to wide and daring enterprise in the early history of the Americas; the precious metals of the South, and the rich peltries of the North. While the fiery and magnificent Spaniard, inflamed with the mania for gold, has extended his discoveries and conquests over those brilliant countries scorched by the ardent sun of the tropics, the adroit and buoyant Frenchman, and the cool and calculating Briton, have pursued the less splendid, but no less lucrative, traffic in furs amidst the hyperborean regions of the Canadas, until they have advanced even within the Arctic Circle. These two pursuits have thus in a manner been the pioneers and precursors of civilization. Without pausing on the borders, they have penetrated at once, in defiance of difficulties and dangers, to the heart of savage countries: laying open the hidden secrets of the wilderness; leading the way to remote regions of beauty and fertility that might have remained unexplored for ages, and beckoning after them the slow and pausing steps of agriculture and civilization. (1)

Irving's florid language here wildly stereotypes the national characteristics of the various imperial invaders who were motivated by the New World's lucre, including the Spanish, the French, and the British. Irving also equates the “wide and daring enterprise” of America with the spread of “civilization,” anticipating the Manifest Destiny ethos that would drive American western expansion during much of the nineteenth century, and connecting that expansionism to economic advancement. Pinpointing the apparent permeability of national borders when commodities like fur and gold are at stake, Irving celebrates in sexually suggestive terms the way these “pioneers and precursors of civilization” have “penetrated” these territories to lay “open the hidden secrets of the wilderness” that is lush with “beauty and fertility.”

Decades after Irving's account of the fur trade was published, two fictional treatments of the commodities he lauds present a more cautious perspective on the impact of imperial economic conquest.