Dynamics of the fur trade

I just finished watching a PBS program on the early fur trade in Minnesota (is it just me or is MN's PBS obsessed with the iron range?)

A few interesting facts stand out: While the French dominated the area, trade was conducted at posts but the traders mostly interacted with tribal leaders. The leaders would bring in furs and pick out what goods they wanted in trade, then they would go and distribute those goods to their people. Also, early in the period the French seem to have stayed near Lake Superior and the Ojibway tribe specialized as middlemen, bringing furs from other, more western tribes and sending goods back. That let the Ojibway keep a monopoly on guns, apparently.

As the french moved further west they began trading directly with the indians doing the hunting and trading guns with them. This led to the Ojibway making war on the Cree and others in the area in order to claim the more fertile hunting grounds since their monopoly on brokering trade had been broken.

After the French and Indian War two English companies moved in. The Hudson Bay company had been active since the late 17th century but they were primarily a ship based group who would make landfall and let the Indians come to them. The Northwest Company moved into the old French trading posts and went to the Indians' villages to trade. This let the Northwest Company gain a huge advantage over the Hudson Bay company, at one point handling something like 78% of all furs.

Both English companies behaved differently than the French in that they traded directly with individuals, cutting the chiefs out of the goods distribution business. Unfortunately there was no mention of how this impacted tribal culture.

Traders established a point system where certain types of pelts were assigned a point value as well as trade goods. It's not entirely clear, but it sounds like the traders sold on credit, allowing the Indian to pick out what supplies he wanted for the winter then coming back with pelts in the spring to pay for it. If this was the case, the fact that the white traders would shoulder the economic risk of something bad happening to an Indian over the winter by granting him credit kicks some of my preconceptions in the pants. I would have thought every transaction between whites and Indians would have been cash over the barrel head.

Finally, the Hudson Bay company wised up and moved their operations to where the Indians were and established trading posts near the Northwest Companies posts, starting a trade war which included shooting as well as (probable) price competition. Unfortunately, the program didn't delve into that aspect before it ended.