Page 52 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

38.
48
missions and large ranches. During the following decade the

export of these articles steadily increased. This change in

the trade was important to California and the United States.

1
In the 1830 s, as had occurred ten years earlier on the North­
west Coast, the fur trade in California faced a shortage of

skins. More importantly, this time the Chinese demand for furs
49
also ebbed. So supply and value both dropped at Canton.

But American traders did not leave the California trade as

they had done when the Northwest had faltered. They had dis­

covered other exports to replace the dwindling fur supply. The

same Americans viewed an expanding demand in California for

imports from China and the Sandwich Islands. In 1837 an Ameri­
can house at Oahu proposed to another house in California a

plan for despatching vessels on a regular run between Canton and
50
California via the Sandwich Islands.
1
Noteworthy too in the late 1830 s was the disappear­

ance from the fur trade of the Boston mercantile houses which

earlier had monopolized that trade in the Northwest and in

California. In their place arose local American merchants who

centered their houses in ports such as San Francisco, Monterrey

and Santa Barbara. Thes.e new houses, most of which had former

ties with Boston houses, now controlled American trade from

California to Canton. This trade was important enough to con-

48
china Trade Days in California: Selected Letters
from the Thompson Papers, 1832-1863, ed. by Donald Mackenzie
Brown (Berkeley, 1947), pp. 1-2. Ogden, California Sea Otter
Trade, p. 91.
49
Ogden, California Sea Otter Trade, pp. 146-47.
50
Brown, China Trade Days in California, p. 26.