Voyageurs
Europeans mainly traded alongside the coast of North America with Native Americans. The early fur trade with Native Americans, which developed alongside the coasts of North America, was not limited to the beaver. Beavers were not particularly valued and people preferred "fancy fur" or "fur that is used with or on the pelt. The fur trade was viewed as secondary to fishing during this era.
The earliest North American fur trading did not include long distance transportation of the furs after they were obtained by trade with the First Nations; it started with trading near settlements or along the coast or waterways accessible by ship. Soon, coureurs des bois achieved business advantages by travelling deeper into the wilderness and trading there. By 1681, the King of France decided to control the traders by publishing an edict that banned fur and pelt trading in New France.
California Fur Rush
Just three years after Juan de Ayala sailed the first ship to pass through the Golden Gate in 1775, North America's Pacific Coast fur trade began, but not by the Spanish who had sailed the California coast since João Rodrigues Cabrilho's voyage in 1542 and Sebastián Vizcaíno's mapping of coastal California in 1602. It began in 1778 with Captain James Cook's third voyage, when otter skins were obtained at Nootka Sound on the Northwest Coast and, although Cook was killed in Hawaii on the way to China, his men were shocked at the high prices paid by the Chinese. A profit of 1,800% was made. In 1783, when John Ledyard reported in Connecticut that enormous profits could be made selling otter skins to China, New England began sending American ships to hunt sea otter, and later, beaver, on the Pacific coast as early as 1787. That the California fur trade had begun by 1785, just ten years after Ayala discovered San Francisco Bay, is evidenced by the Spanish issuance of regulations to govern the collection of otter skins in California. The west coast fur trade enabled New England merchants to recover from the economic collapse which followed the American Revolutionary War, and was exacerbated by closure of British home and colonial ports to American trade.