Marblehead author launches new book tour

MARBLEHEAD – The first 300 years of American history revolved around the fight to develop and control the fur trade, according to “Fur, Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America” by Marblehead author Eric Jay Dolin.By 1900, the year Dolin’s book ends, fur trappers had given the United States its present borders and had driven the beaver, the sea otter and the buffalo to the brink of extinction.Forty people gathered in the Abbot Public Library meeting room Thursday evening to hear Dolin’s “whirlwind tour” of his new book, illustrated by slides. He will soon be leaving for an eight-state book tour of the western states. Library Director Patricia Rogers thanked him for starting his tour in town.What a history it is: the Dutch, based in New York, drove a Swedish colony from their borders because the Swedes were trapping furs that the Dutch wanted. Then the English drove out the Dutch and pushed the French back, only to have the American colonists drive them out in the Revolutionary War.Frustrated for a time by French control of the Midwest and fur trapping there, American ships made an end run around the continent to the Pacific Northwest, where they found abundant sea otter and seals whose pelts could be traded with China.Following the Louisiana Purchase, American trappers led the westward expansion, taking beaver to the point of extinction. The Transcontinental Railroad had a similar effect on millions of buffalo, which were slaughtered for food as well as hides.Dolin assured his audience that those 300 years led to the establishment of the conservation movement in the United States and today the beaver, the sea otter and even the buffalo are making a comeback – but he had to end his book in 1900.After years of education at Brown, Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that led him to a doctorate, Dolin found that his background in environmental policy and biology led him to an abiding concern for ecology and natural history.Asked about his inspirations, Dolin said he had no single mentor – but he recalled Yale Professor Bill Cronon, who has a lifelong passion for American environmental history – the way people relate to nature and the way it affects their lives.”He was a brilliant historian and speaker,” Dolin said. He added that he has always found history “fascinating.”His next book will be about America’s trade with China, a relationship that kept the new country economically viable.The two pieces of art on the cover of the “Fur” book are a John James Audubon painting of a beaver and one of America’s most valuable 19th Century landscape paintings, Thomas Moran’s “Green River of Wyoming,” which sold at auction for $17.7 million at an auction at Christie’s in New York in 2008.”We got the use of it for considerably less than that,’ Dolin said.