What can the writings of Moravian missionary John Heckeweleder tell us about the early Colonial fur trade? As it turns out, these writings provide insights into life several hundred years ago in what is today New Jersey, southern New York, and Pennsylvania.​

 

Marian Leech, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the personal correspondence of John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary who, in the 1800s, lived in Gnadenhutten, Ohio, among a Lenape community that had converted to Christianity. Heckewelder was fluent in the Lenape language and recorded and translated many of the area’s Lenape place names. He also wrote about the Lenape’s relations with neighboring groups, as well as their views on animals.

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Leech's talk, “Human–Animal Relations in the Early Colonial Fur Trade,” explores two different beaver species that inhabit North America and Eurasia. These species look very similar, inhabit similar environments and fulfill similar ecological functions, but have markedly different histories due to how humans have interacted with them on either side of the Atlantic. While overhunting and deforestation drove beaver populations to near extinction in Western Europe by the 1500s, beavers thrived in North America before the colonial fur trade. Drawing from an array of sources, including the writings of Heckewelder, the presentation examines the height of the seventeenth-century fur trade in today's eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and southern New York, showing how exchanges between Indigenous actors and Dutch colonists were also marked by an exchange of ideas and beliefs about the non-human world. ​​