CHAPTER XVIII THE EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRIES Ways of acquiring wealth. In the diagram in the chapter on Economic Activities the ways of acquiring wealth are divided into two main classes, the uneconomical and the economical. It was also pointed out that from the social or national point of view it is uneconomical to have men acquiring wealth by methods which do not add to the total wealth or well-being of the society or the nation. The economical ways of getting a living were further subdivided into three classes: the primary industries, the secondary industries, and professional and personal service. The primary industries. The primary industries are themselves subdivided into two classes, the extractive and the genetic. Extractive industries are those which merely appropriate natural objects without any attempt to replace what is taken or to keep up and increase the supply. The genetic industries, which might almost be called creative, are those primary industries which make a conscious effort to replace that which is taken and to increase the supply. Thus, hunting wild animals and grazing domesticated animals on free ranges are extractive, whereas tillage and stock-breeding are genetic. Lumbering or cutting timber in a natural forest is extractive, whereas forestry, the scientific growing of timber, is genetic. Mining is extractive. There does not seem to be any genetic industry which bears the same relation to it as fish culture bears to fishing, or forestry to lumbering. Hunting. Of all industries hunting is the most primitive. It was sometimes combined with fishing as a means of subsistence. It usually included the search for edible fruits, nuts, and vege tables, as well as the killing of animals, and it sometimes even degenerated into a man hunt; that is, the hunting, killing, and robbing of men. Where animals constituted the most abundant source of food, primitive men quite naturally hunted animals. Where fruits, nuts, and edible roots were abundant it was not uncommon for the search for these foods to become the chief occupation. The hunting of animals led naturally to domestication and herding, and the search for fruits and herbs led quite as naturally to horticulture, as the next stage in industrial development. Our own primitive ancestors seem to have been hunters, and later herdsmen, before they took up agriculture. The North American Indians lived mainly by hunting animals, though they had taken to the cultivation of crops on a small scale. They seem not to have domesticated any animal except the dog, before the coming of the white man. This direct passage from hunting to tillage, without an intermediate stage of herding, is considered somewhat exceptional. The ancient Peruvians had domesticated the llama and the alpaca. The ancient Mexicans had become horticulturists apparently without having been herdsmen at all; their primitive hunting seems to have consisted mainly in searching for fruits and herbs rather than for animals. Hunting, which includes trapping, has played an important part and still plays an appreciable part in our national economy. The abundance of game on our Western frontiers, when we had a frontier, was an important source of food for the advance army of settlers. The emigrants who crossed the Great Plains in the early settlement of the Pacific coast also benefited to a certain extent from the herds of buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope which at one time abounded. More important, however, was the regular business of trapping fur-bearing animals and of trading with the Indians for the skins and furs which they collected. A great deal of the history of our frontier, beginning with the first settlements on the Atlantic coast and continuing across the continent, has been a history of the fur trade.. Relatively to her size and her other industries, the fur trade has been even more important in Canada than in the United States. Great companies, such as the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company of Merchants of Canada, were organized which, especially during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, swayed the destinies of that country and parts of our own Northwest. They maintained numerous trading-posts and employed thousands of men, who explored every nook and corner of the territory over which they operated. Similar though smaller companies were formed within the United States to trade with our own Indians. Many of our Western pioneers, guides, and scouts, of whom Kit Carson was the most famous, began their careers as hunters and trappers for these various companies. The story of their adventures adds a romantic element to the early history of our Far West, but they were making their living by gathering furs to supply the demands of commerce. After the building of the transcontinental railroads across the great Western plains a rich harvest of buffalo skins was reaped for a few brief years. The lamentable result was that the buffaloes, or bison (as they are more properly named), which had roamed in countless numbers over those plains, were almost exterminated in the two decades from 1870 to 1890. It is doubtful whether such a slaughter of noble animals had ever taken place before in the history of the world. As the country has become settled, fur-bearing animals, as well as other wild animals whose skins form articles of commerce, have tended to grow scarcer, though no such wholesale destruction has overtaken any of the others (except the beaver) as that which overtook the buffalo. Most of them are small enough to find cover and sustenance for small numbers in the woods and fields of settled communities. Therefore hunting and trapping still supply a small fraction of our national income. The most valuable of all our inland fur-bearing animals, the beaver, has almost disappeared, along with the buffalo; but minks, muskrats, raccoons, opossums, skunks, foxes, and coyotes are still found in small numbers. The subarctic regions |