With Fort Smith as a centre, there remains an unmarred fur-preserve and a race of hardy trappers. Is the fur-trade diminishing? Statistics are extremely difficult to get, dealers do not publish dividend-sheets, the stockholders of the Mother-Lodge of the H.B. Company do not advertise. There is no import duty on raw skins into the United States, and so no means of keeping tally on the large shipments of fur which yearly find their way south from Canada. The statistics which are available overlap. Raw furs making out by Montreal to Europe come back, many of them, as manufactured imports into this continent by way of New York. Canada in 1904 sent to her American cousins furs and skins and manufactures of the same to the value of $670,472. This year the export has been more than doubled; the exact figures are $1,531,912. In 1908, Canada sent to France $110,184 worth of raw and manufactured fur, to Germany $23,173 worth, and to Belgium $19,090 worth.
More money goes to the trapper to-day for such common skins as red-fox and skunk and muskrat than was ever paid to the fur-hunter for beaver, seal, and sea-otter in the old days. Six million dollars worth of raw furs are sold annually by auction in London, and Canada is the Mother Country's chief feeder. Included in these London sales are some hundred thousand martens, or Hudson Bay sables, and probably four times that number of mink. The imports of raw furs and exports of the manufactured article cross each other so perplexingly that to-day the wearer of fur clothing has no way of finding out in what part of the world her stole or cap or jacket had origin. On the feet of the sacrificed animal, by snowshoe of trapper and scow of the trader, it may have travelled half round the world before, in the shop-window, it tempted her taste and pocket-book. Furs will be always fashionable; the poet of old who declared, "I'll rob no ermyn of his dainty skin to make mine own grow proud," would find scanty following among the women of fashion in this age.
In some parts of the United States an ingenious by-industry to the fur-trade has arisen, for the offered-bounty destructive animals are carefully reared in illicit kindergartens. As some states pay for the scalps of these animal pests and other states for the tails, the undertaking is interesting and profitable. The only gamble is in the nursery. When the gladsome breeder gets his wild-cat or coyote big enough to market, it is "heads I win, tails you lose." The United States, in twenty-five years, has paid two and a half millions in wild animal bounties. California paid in a year and a half $190,000 on coyotes alone, and no breed of noxious animals is yet extinct.