the animal use behaviors of the Indians. The popularity of the beaver hat triggered a take-off in the fur trade (Martin, 173). Along with beaver, marten, fisher, otter, mink, and muskrat fed the clothing tastes of Europeans and wealthy Americans, along with the skins of moose, deer, antelope, elk, bison, and caribou. Of these animals, the beaver pelt was the most popular and most trapped. Ernest Thompson Seton estimates that about one million beaver were trapped or died of natural causes between 1860 and 1870 in North America (Martin, 175). Hunting was so much a part of an accepted way of life that one hunter, John Hutchins, proudly proclaimed that during his life he had destroyed 100 moose, 1000 deer, 10 caribou, 100 bears, 50 wolves, 500 foxes, 100 raccoons, 25 wildcats, 100 lynx, 150 otter, 600 beaver, 400 fishers, thousands of mink and marten, and tens of thousands of muskrats (Martin, 175).
These grisly statistics are accompanied by trends caused by hunting on horseback (horses brought by Europeans) and the practice of marrying more than one woman. "More wives tanned more hides for the traders" (Martin, 178). One can see that many forces interrelated in the areas of trade, ecology, farming, and hunting. No one was completely guilty and no one was completely innocent. According to Martin, what we see when dispassionately looking at the information is that many of the Native Americans felt a genuine respect for the welfare of other life forms and lived practically as a result of that ideology (Martin, 186). Sometimes other life forms were respected out of fear and anticipation of retaliation, and sometimes the other forms were genuinely respected.
Basically mankind has a drive to survive. The Indian's method was one of balance of nature, but Martin thinks that the Indian's traditional conception of Nature is not really a suitable basis for troubled environmental issues in America. Indians have a profoundly diffe...