What may be called the first industry of the Mississippi Valley, the fur trade, was one of such importance commercially as to be a chief cause of the friction between France and England in America prior to the French and Indian War. Interest in territory for its own sake seems to have been remote and secondary, compared with the immediate interest in a traffic that contributed to national revenue and built up large private fortunes. This applies to no locality more than to Indiana, where one vast forest teemed with fur-bearing animals. The agents of the fur trade were the real explorers, and the recorded discoveries of the avowed explores were, doubtless, meager beside the unrecorded ones of the men who traversed the streams wherever there was a chance of Indian trade. At one time during the French regime the annual trade at the post of Ouiatanon alone is said to have been £8,000, and in the year 1786 showed an exportation amounting to £275,977. One of the early acts of William Henry Harrison as Governor of the Indiana Territory (in 1801-02) was to grant trading licenses, the local privileges of each trader being defined, and a list of forty of these within the present limits of the state has been preserved. A subsequent list extends the trade, as to time, to 1857, before which period it had ceased to be "Indian trade." The persistence with which wild animals continued to exist in face of this ruthless war of extermination is illustrated by the fact that in the middle of the 19th Century, at least a hundred and fifty years after the wholesale killing was inaugurated, the Ewing brothers, whose trading houses were at Ft. Wayne and Logansport, are said to have amassed about two million dollars at the business.

The men employed as carriers by the early French traders were the famous coureurs des bois, a class of half-wild woodsmen, which stands out picturesquely in history. The business, as conducted through the carriers of a little later period, is thus described by Dillon:

"The furs and peltries which were obtained from the Indians were generally transported to Detroit. The skins were dried, compressed and secured in packs. Each pack weighed about one hundred pounds. A Pirogue, or boat, that was sufficiently large to carry forty packs required the labor of four men to manage it on its voyage. In favorable stages of the Wabash River, such a vessel, under the management of skilful boatmen, was propelled fifteen or twenty miles a day against the current. After ascending the Wabash River and the Little River to the portage near Fort Wayne, the traders carried their packs over the portage to the head of the Maumee, where they were again placed in pirogues, or in keelboats, to be transported to Detroit. At this place the furs and skins were exchanged for blankets, guns, knives, powder, bullets, intoxicating liquors, etc., with which the traders returned to their several posts." Elsewhere the same authority tells us that the articles carried by the French traders were, chiefly, "coarse blue and red cloths, fine scarlet, guns, powder, balls, knives, hatchets, traps, kettles, hoes, blankets, coarse cottons, ribbons, beads, vermilion, tobacco, spirituous liquors, etc." How profitable the trade was may be gathered from the statement that the value placed on bullets was four dollars per hundred and powder was priced at one dollar per pint by American traders.