Wort Residency Lecture 3: Entangled Histories of Fur Trade Instruments in the Pittsburgh Waste Book (1759-60)

This lecture works with British colonial trade records as sources for understanding the Indigenous-driven consumption and resocialization of imported European sound instruments at Fort Pitt during the Seven Years’ War. Among the items that Lenape, Seneca Cayuga, Shawnee, and other consumers acquired at Fort Pitt’s fur trading houses were a range of sound-capable goods, including some that Europeans had manufactured for sound production (like bells and jaw harps) and others that Indigenous artisans repurposed as soundmakers of their own design. I propose regional Indigenous patterns of consuming trade sound instruments by analyzing the fort’s earliest known trade ledger, the “Pittsburgh Waste Book (1759-60),” held at the University of Pittsburgh. I find that its unusually detailed entries, read critically and in dialogue with other kinds of sources, can help us understand the overlapping sonic materialities that converged in colonial trading and diplomacy at the fort. Finally, I argue that these instruments’ dynamic materialities call on researchers to envision entangled or “shared histories” of musicking in the eighteenth-century Northeast that are not reducible to static “Native” or “colonial” ones.