"In the fiscal year ended June 30, 1917 the foreign trade of the United States in raw and manufactured furs reached nearly, if not fully, the high level of years preceding the war. The imports were valued at $21,553,375, while the exports amounted to $15,729,160, a sum exceeded in only one previous year, 1913 when they were $28,389,586. Home manufacture and utilization of American furs has grown enormously since the beginning of the war. The large export trade of the past year shows, therefore, a production of pelts of unprecedented value, in spite of the fact that the actual number of skins collected must have been less than in previous years. Many former trappers were more profitably employed in other industries, and many were deterred from plying their vocation by the increased restrictions on trapping, especially the costly nonresident licenses. Trapping restrictions properly enforced and limiting the taking of fur to prescribed seasons will result not only in conserving the fur supply but in greatly increasing the quality and value of the annual catch." -- p.2

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.