Learning Online Centre

Using the three languages of the fur trade in the Great Lakes area, we welcome you to the White Oak Learning Centre. We present to you a period of time from the late 1600's to the mid-1800's. These were the years when the North American fur trade grew. The people in Europe wanted beaver skins to make hats and other furs for clothing. European companies traded goods such as cloth, hatchets, kettles, beads, needles and guns for furs provided by Native Americans.

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The White Oak Learning Centre offers you both on-site and on-line learning opportunities. You can visit our fur post for a day or for several days. Interpreters are also available for visiting schools and participating in community events. This web site will serve as a link between us and those who cannot visit the post and those who want to continue learning after their visit. You will find opportunities to communicate with us, with interpreters and with each other. Please stay in touch. We welcome your suggestions for improving the Learning Centre.

For more information, visit the White Oak Learning Centre page.
We have detailed information for teachers.

Step Back in Time to the Fur Trade

It is late June, early July 1798 at a major Northwest Company Fur Post in what is now Northern Minnesota.

Summer is in full swing. The great expanses of blue sky and water causing one to marvel. The whisper of leaves floats along the breeze, Aspen, Birch,and Maple. The many varieties of Pines standing as sentinels among the rest. The smell of wood smoke is sharp from the campfires of the Native American village nearby, the haphazard camps of the voyageur, and the separate campsites of the travelers from further inland that have come to trade their winter beaver and furs for goods.

Surrounded by the vastness of wilderness, the company post is crowded with small single buildings surrounded by the stockade and bastions, the Great Hall gleaming in contrast. A constant bustle of trade and enterprise is being accomplished despite language barriers, different religious beliefs, ethnicity, and the distinct segregation of social class.

Visting Bourgeois and Montreal Agents gather to discuss business of the day and next season's strategy. How pelts are selling. How the tariffs, insurance, and government regulations are affecting the trade. All are of importance. From the wintering partners, kinds of goods the Native Americans are buying and in what quantity. The Indians are exacting customers, and their needs and tastes are different from the Europeans. This dictates what supplies the company and clerks will order this fall for next springs shipment to the interior.

The currency of the day is beaver. The trade items comming from Montreal are milled blankets in several sizes and point value, coarse woollen cloths of different kinds, cotton, linens, and coarse sheeting. Thread, lines, twine, common hardware, cutlery, kettles of brass and copper, tin goods, ironmongery of several descriptions and sheet iron are all available. Also arriving are silk and cotton handkerchiefs, hats, shoes and hose of necessity to the wintering gentlemen, and of course the more profitable trade items for the Norwest Company, "womens", beads, needles, awls, ribbon, jewelry and vermilion. Arms and ammunition as well as twist and carrot tobacco were also items of trade, but blankets and cloth far outweighed their importance.
As the clerks separate, count and verify the incoming packs, we become aware of all the other provisions that are arriving. Brandy and High Wine in large quanity, salt, tea, some refined sugar, flour, spices, and candles. What other things do you think would have been neccessary for the survival and comfort of the fur post wintering partners, clerks, and voyageurs?

Everything is being paddled in and out by canoe and the labor of the voyageur.

Going back to Montreal are the beaver pelts and furs that are in great demand for the manufacture of hats for the gentlemen and ladies in Europe.

Explore the era of the fur trade with us, along with the personalities and lives of some of the people that make up this period in our history.

The On-Line Learning Centre

On-line learning opportunities are offered for those who cannot visit the White Oak Fur Post and for those who want to learn more about the fur trading period of our history. The On-line Learning Centre is divided into several sections. You can choose from the menu below to explore and to learn.

You can also write directly to one of our interpretive staff. They can answer questions and tell you more about life at the fur post.

Space provided courtesy of Paulbunyan Net

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