Other peoples' fur - February 25, 2012

Solar radiation feels good. It wasn't all that warm this morning, but each time I took Anya out for a walk in the sunshine—and she had digestive difficulties today so I took several walks with her. Poor girl.

We went over to the John Rose Oval, the Twin Cities' speed-skating track, which had open skating, which Ingrid and Daniel took advantage of, while our friend Dave and I stood on the sidelines and talked politics.

I've given up on Fur Fortune and Empire. Not that it's a bad book; I was enjoying it muchly, and it does give a pretty fair picture of the fur trade in America, which had a much bigger impact on the trajectory of US territorial history than we give it credit for. History is written by the settlers and their decendants, not by the descendants of traders who exploited a quickly-depleted resource. The book is a welcome remediation this gap.

No, the book's problem for me is that it loses sight of the market for fur. I really wanted to know who was wearing furs, and especially how this changed over time. There are hints of this: beaver hats, for example, which are made from felted beaver fur, not from "furs" as we generally think of them (fur-on hides), were a high-end bourgeouis commodity, rather than a mark of actual aristocracy like ermine. I didn't stick around for the emergence of buffalo robes as a common American warmth-provider, but I do know it was far from a luxury item—Almonzo Wilder has one in his sleigh to keep Laura Ingalls warm as he takes her home from her teaching job through frigid cold and blizzardy winds.

But of course the buffalo herds were exhausted in a matter of decades between the introduction of the railroads through the high plains and the turn of the century. The buffalo robe as an everyday source of warmth probably didn't go out of fashion as much as simply go out of stock.

This is the kind of thing I want to know more about. Maybe a history of fur as fashion.

I have three other books now sitting waiting for me to read them for this blog. Two are social histories of alcohol, and one is a series of papers from a conference ten years ago at the British Museum, on Arctic clothing, especially from the American Arctic. Given how much of our contemporary winter outerwear owes its form to Inuit clothing, this latter should be very interesting stuff.

Finally, I'd like to look a little at the development of modern thinking about building insulation.