Fur Trade
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
Long before we arrived along the coast, the Native American Indians hunted for the infamous beaver. They used it for food and used the pelts for clothing. But the Europeans had a different idea on what to do with "Beave." They liked him for the kind of hat he made for them. The pelt had two layers. The outer layer was made of coarse guard hair and the undercoat of soft, velvet like fur called the duvet. When the guard hairs are removed, the woolly under fur was perfect for making felt hats. When the hat was manufactured, the fur was removed from the skin and mashed together with adhesives and stiffeners. One of the additives was mercury. The fumes affected the brains of hat makers, giving the rise to the expression "mad as a hatter", and we always thought the expression came from Lewis Carroll's famous children's book Alice in Wonderland of 1865...