by Richard
Ravalli, William Jessup University
This
image of a sealskin coat with sea otter trim was included in an 1893-1894
season catalog of H. Liebes and Company.
It depicts a time when the San Francisco-based furrier founded by
German-Jewish immigrant Herman Liebes was expanding its influence in the
Pacific fur trade. Conversely, it was
also a time when sea otters were beginning to disappear from Pacific
waters. Decades of hunting facilitated
by American trade ships after the Alaska Purchase of 1867 had brought the
species to its environmental nadir, and entrepreneurs like Liebes played a
distinct role in that process. Advertisements
for garments with sea otter fur were therefore on the verge of becoming as
extinct as the animals themselves. A few
years after the H. Liebes catalog was published, sea otters finally began to
receive more attention from governmental authorities and Herman Liebes himself
passed away, an epilogue symbolic of the real connections between the man and
the sea mammals he pursued.
Liebes
was born around 1842 and worked in the London fur industry before immigrating
to New York during the Civil War. By
1864 he was in San Francisco where he eventually established H. Liebes and
Company with partner Charles J. Behlow.
Herman’s English cousin Isaac joined them in 1869. [1] In a short amount
of time the company rose to prominence in the San Francisco fur trade. The purchase of Alaska from Russia by the
United States dramatically increased the flow of Pacific pelts to the city,
especially following the formation of the Alaska Commercial Company in 1868, a
consortium of businessmen that also included prominent German-Jewish immigrants
in San Francisco. Two years later, the
ACC was awarded a lucrative government lease to manage the fur seal rookeries
of the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea for twenty years. [2] While more
research is needed on the question, it is possible that many of the firm’s Alaskan
fur seal and sea otter pelts were purchased and processed by H. Liebes around
this time.
Despite
the important role played by the ACC in the Pacific fur trade, San Francisco
furriers in the late 19th century ultimately benefited from a variety
of commercial vessels that plied the ocean for sea mammals, including some of
their own ships. Past sources on H.
Liebes have suggested that the company did not engage in direct trading with
the natives of the Aleutian Islands until 1887. [3] In actuality, it was in
that year that one trader specified that H. Liebes “has been engaged in dealing
and bartering for furs on the Aleutian chain for ten years or more last
past. They have had several vessels on
the coast every year carrying up supplies and carrying back peltries.” [4] A document
from earlier in the decade claimed that the company had “8 small vessels
hunting seals and trading for furs in northern waters. [5] While sea otter
skins came to San Francisco from throughout the Pacific in this era, it was
these Alaskan trading ventures in particular that supplied the raw material for
the city’s otter fur industry.
Herman
and Isaac Liebes expanded their influence in the Alaskan trade with the
establishment of the North American Commercial Company. This new firm, aided by considerable
political connections in Washington D.C., successfully outbid the ACC and other
competitors for a new government fur seal lease at the
Pribilofs in 1890. Isaac was the first
president of the NACC and Herman likely played a central role in its founding.
[6] While the NACC focused its energies on fur sealing, sea otter hunting was
not neglected. In 1896, an ACC employee
at Sanak Island in the Aleutians noted the activity of a NACC schooner named
the Therese “which is to hunt sea
otter in these waters.” [7] Other Liebes vessels brought sea otter pelts to San
Francisco in the 1890s. The Alexander brought in six skins
“consigned to H. Liebes & Co.” in 1891. [8] Relatively low catches such as
the Alexander’s were not uncommon at
the time, and fears were mounting that the species was going extinct.
A
Treasury Department report in 1897, one of the first government documents to
focus exclusively on the sea otter, noted the decline in the otter fur trade
and its impact on native Aleutian hunters. As it warned, “Under present conditions the
sea otter is becoming extinct, and, as many of the hunting schooners are manned
by white hunters from San Francisco, the natives are receiving only a part of
the benefit.” [9] That same year, the United States and other countries of the
North Pacific made continued efforts to protect both the fur seal and the sea
otter. Included in the regulations was the
first attempt to impose an international ban on killing otters. [10]
By
that time Herman Liebes had moved to London for medical reasons and Isaac had
taken over control of his cousin’s business interests in San Francisco. [11] In
February of 1898, Liebes passed away in London.
He died “far from home,” according to the San Francisco Call, far from the ocean and marine life which
enabled him to build a commercial empire. [12]
--
[1]
“The Fur Trade of San Francisco,” The New
York Times, October 6, 1867; Don MacGillivray, Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London’s Sea Wolf (Vancouver: UBC Press,
2008), 67, 279n13.
[2]
For the Alaska Commercial Company, see Molly Lee, “Context and Contact: The
History and Activities of the Alaska Commercial Company, 1867-1900,” in Nelson
H.H. Graburn, Molly Lee, Jean-Loup Rousselot, eds., Catalogue Raisonne of the Alaska Commercial Company Collection,
Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996.
[3]
See Rudolf Glanz, “From Fur Rush to Gold Rushes: Alaskan Jewry from the Late
Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries,” Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 14 (January 1976), 99;
Norton B. Stern, “The Liebes Company: Importers and Manufacturers of Fur
Products, San Francisco, California & Alaska,” Western States Jewish History XLI, 1 (Fall 2008), 211.
[4]
United States, House of Representatives, Report from the Committee on Merchant
Marine and Fisheries, Investigation of
The Fur Seal and Other Fisheries of Alaska (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1889), 397. The trader
also noted that H. Liebes maintained a store “for several years” at Belkofski
on the Alaska Peninsula.
[5]
John S. Hittell, The Commerce and
Industries of the Pacific Coast of North America (San Francisco: A.L.
Bancroft & Co., Publishers, 1882), 337.
[6] MacGillivray,
74-75.
[7]
Book I: Unalaska Letter Book #6 (Outgoing), 1895-1897, Page 42, in J. Pennelope
Goforth, ed., Bringing Aleutian History
Home: The Lost Ledgers of the Alaska Commercial Company, 1875-1897 (DVD,
2011). Special thanks to Alaska maritime
historian Pennelope Goforth for providing me a copy of this resource.
[8]
The Morning Call, December 27, 1891,
2.
[9]
C. L. Hooper, A Report on the Sea-Otter
Banks of Alaska (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1897), 13.
[10]
United States Department of State, Protocols
of the International Fur Seal Conference (1897). Also see Kirkpatrick Dorsey, The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy:
U.S.-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1998), 127-128.
[11]
MacGillivray, 115.
[12]
The San Francisco Call, March 2,
1898, 7.
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