By Philippe Willis
Contributing Writer
In the gray and still-leafless, late winter mountains of central West Virginia, trappers, root diggers, graders, suppliers and buyers gathered at the 57th-annual West Virginia Fur Auction in Glenville in Gilmer County, over the weekend of March 6 – 8. With more than 3,000 pelts coming through the doors to be graded, hung and auctioned, these hardy and fast working men and women are the remnants of the very trade that founded America. That is, the fur trade.
Now, dear reader, before the auctioneer rattles off his starting prices, let us travel back through the annals of time. The trading of peltry in the New World dates prior to the establishment of European colonies, with the 15th – 16th century Basque fishermen trading with Northeastern coastal natives as they went to shore to salt their catches of cod. By the time of the Plymouth Colony, the fur trade was firmly rooting itself for centuries to come. From the 1600-to-late-1700s, the Europeans, like the French, Dutch and English, would trade their knives, axes, guns, pots, wool blankets, beads and wampum for peltry hunted and trapped by the eastern woodland Indians, with a primary focus on the beaver, that aquatic and architectural rodent, Castor canadensis. While otters, wildcats and minks also made it on the cargo hold of one of the first fur laden ships from New Amsterdam [Manhattan] back home to the Netherlands in 1626, it was the beaver that was so coveted by the Old World’s hat felt industry. First mentioned in Chaucer’s 14th-century, Canterbury Tales, beaver felt hats were an enormously significant article of clothing for the likes of military officers, clerics, merchants and gentlemen, changing in style and design over their long sartorial reign from the late 1500s-to-mid-1800s.
Now to bring us back to the mountains and waterways of the great state of West Virginia. At the shockingly early date of 1671, the Virginia fur trader, Abraham Wood, living and trading at the western limits of the colony’s coastal plains, sent two of his men with Indian guides across the Piedmont and over the Blue Ridge to penetrate the daunting Alleghenies in search of where the tide ebbed and flowed. His retainers were the first known Englishmen to travel down the New and Kanawha rivers into present day West Virginia, where they turned back at the mouth of the Gauley due to hunger and weariness. A couple years later, in 1673, Wood sent Gabriel Arthur and James Needham to find out more about the western frontier. After a series of adventures including the murder of Needham while living, traveling and fighting with a group of Tennessee Cherokees, Arthur found himself with the band’s chief farther down the Kanawha than any white man known prior. Somewhere before reaching the Ohio, while joining a raid against the Shawnee, he was injured and captured. When discovered to not be of Cherokee blood, Arthur and the Shawnee began in sign-language to discuss the potential for trade between their beavers and Virginia’s tools, as they were yet still unfamiliar with the white man’s guns and metals, and were keen for the advantages of European technology.
At some point in the 1700s, the European-Americans began with blacksmith-hammered-and-hardened iron traps to catch the beavers for themselves. And here in West Virginia, we have brief anecdotes about pioneer legends, Simon Kenton who with two others trapped along the Elk River at present day Charleston, and Daniel Boone who went on a beaver expedition up the Gauley where he was surprised to discover a “great Yew Pine forest” in Webster County. It was the first yew he had ever seen and so he cut a walking stick’s worth to show the others back on the Kanawha. Here in Pocahontas County, their contemporary, Moses Moore, some- time around 1765, was trapping the Greenbrier below Cass when he overstayed his winter welcome and was captured by an early-spring Indian hunting party and taken north to their Ohio villages. And, of course, one must not forget our little hamlet of Huntersville, whose name is in honor of an early trading post where hunters and trappers came to trade.
And thus, 230-some-years after Daniel Boone’s Gauley expedition, your narrator found himself in Gilmer County at a fur auction, imbued in this history whilst surrounded by a multitude of stretched and dried pelts. There was the beaver and the muskrat, the wildcat and the coyote, the coon and the possum, fox and skunk, otter and mink, and least of all in number, 10 of the fisher kind and three of the white, winter-coated weasels known as ermine. For two days prior to the auction, trappers arrived in their pickups with giant sacks stuffed full. They waited in line for hours as the master graders inspected their catches, pelt by pelt looking over the skins for imperfections. Perhaps there was a bald spot naturally rubbed away from frequent tight passage into the animal’s den, or the trapper himself mishandled his fur, an accidental puncture while skinning and fleshing or worst yet, having not properly scraped away the fat, a rotten slippage of fur!
Behind the graders, Vice President of the West Virginia Trappers Association Steve McCue, a naturalist and autodidact, darted back and forth sorting the furs into lots by species, size and grade. As McCue noted, The West Virginia Fur Auction is one of the last of its kind, a consignment auction where buyers purchase by the lot, say 100 #1 foxes, thus driving up higher prices rather than having the buyers tediously parsing through each individual trapper’s winter catch.
WVTA President Jeremiah Whitlatch spoke of a bygone time, when his grandfather would mink trap the creeks after his graveyard shift at Dupont, doubling the household income. While the women’s mink coat craze of the 1940s-1950s could bring the likes of his grandfather $25 a mink [roughly $450 today with inflation], Whitlatch might get an average of $14 for the same pelt.
On Sunday, the buyers arrived having traveled from as far as Cincinnati, New Jersey and the Old Dominion. An hour before the auction, the clipboard and spreadsheet wielding buyers could be seen milling around the hangers and overflowing boxes, eager to fill their inventories.
Now reader, if you’ve heard the fur industry is dead or at best limping along, prepare to open your minds, for there are new markets for the savvy businessman. Most unexpected of all is the oddities and curiosities subculture taking hold amongst artistic, alternative youth where heavily tattooed guys and galls in black are learning the art of taxidermy for a gothic home décor aesthetic that is reminiscent of the Victorian cabinet of curiosities. Skulls are sold for display on bookshelves while bacula, that is, the reproductive bones of male mammals like raccoons and mustelids, are worked into jewelry. Ohio’s Paulette Fur Company caters to a niche costume market selling to reenactors, powwow participants, cosplay fans and Renaissance Fair goers seeking furs for their outfits.
Select skunk pelts have been bringing in prices as high as $50 due to their demand for Jewish religious customs. Deer horns are sold by the pound for dog treats or to craft knife-makers for handles. Squirrel and deer tails are sought after by fly tyers. Carefully removed scent glands such as beaver castoreum and skunk essence with its diabolical stench are bought by trapping lure makers. Inspecting the bobcat and opossum lots was a Cincinnati furrier who planned to bid on the raw materials needed for his cold weather hats, mittens and coats. Coming full circle to the storied beaver, his fur is still being sold into the hat felt industry that’s lasted over five centuries, living on today through the Stetson cowboy hat made popular again by the hit TV series, “Yellowstone.”
With bated breath, the buyers sat before the auctioneer, their hands rising or resting as he rattled out the climbing prices per unit, though they’re sold by the lot: for example, three ermines for $12 each is a $36 lot, or 63 XL bobcats for $92.50 a piece is a $5,827.50 winning bid!
Taking note of the many family businesses present, father and son duo of Windy Ridge Trapper claimed that coon prices are the most exemplary of the fur industry’s health as a whole, as they are easily caught by both land and water trappers; yet to no one’s surprise at Glenville, they brought in a piddly average of $3.97. While the weekend’s big money went to bobcats, fishers and Virginia snakeroot, to the trappers it’s a labor of love, paying less than minimum wage to break one’s back over a fleshing beam. As WVTA state organizer Warren McClung succinctly put it, “It’s not about the money, as it is about the tradition and keeping things alive. Trapping and fur handling. I’d love to see more people involved in this. Fur is natural. It’s biodegradable. And I wish environmental people would look at the benefits of a renewable [resource].”
While the modern trapper is the most reviled and persecuted outdoorsman-or-woman, your humble narrator has found them to be a welcoming, passionate and deeply knowledgeable group of nature enthusiasts. A grizzled old-timer reflected the overall sentiment, “My school room was out in the woods and the rivers. My schoolbooks were “Fur, Fish and Game” and other trapping magazines. Mother Nature and the animals them- selves were my teacher. So, I learned to pretty well think and even sometimes smell like an animal.”
These trappers and fur mongers are something of a relic, a reminder of the old days on the frontier followed by the rural folkways of the 19th and 20th centuries. Here remain the proud torchbearers of the ancient trade that founded America.
• Disclaimer: Modern trapping is heavily regulated by the Department of Natural Resources. Designated biologists oversee the harvesting of furbearers, creating bag limits and season dates to best maintain healthy and abundant populations of these wonderful creatures. For more information check out the West Virginia Trappers Association. www.wvtrappers.com
