ORAL PRESENTER TITLE: Dammed: The fur trade and its effects on forested wetlands ABSTRACT: Histories of the fur trade typically focus on the economic rise and fall of the European fur market, intercultural connections forged between Indigenous people and Euro-Americans, or the wars between Native Nations due to economic participation and alliances. This presentation examines how the overhunting of fur-bearing animals, particularly beavers, substantially altered the forested wetlands around Lake Superior. Incorporating historical evidence and environmental science, I attempt to answer the question: if, according to historical estimates, fur hunters exterminated 95-99 percent of the regional beaver population, exactly how would that decline over several centuries have transformed the region’s characteristic wetland environments, specifically water levels? I also examine the ways in which other animals would have responded to the decline of beaver and other fur-bearing animals, moving into their ecological niche and transforming the forest environment in new ways. A full accounting of the historical ecological fallout from the fur trade has yet to be written, but may help researchers better understand both the environmental effects of the fur trade and the sociocultural changes experienced by Native Nations during that time. BIO: Hayden L. Nelson is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Kansas, where he specializes in environmental and Indigenous history in the North American West. His dissertation, “The North Woods: An Environmental History from the Fur Trade to the Civil War,” investigates the ways in which both human and non-human actors transformed the forested region before the post-Civil War logging boom.