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These alliances ensured that the French became deeply enmeshed in Aboriginal economies, societies, and politics, while simultaneously drawing Aboriginal peoples into a European sphere of influence. Securing these services required the French to forge alliances with several First Nations, including the Montagnais, the Algonquins, and the Hurons in the first half of the seventeenth century, and the Saulteaux, the Potawatomis, and the Choctaws in the second. Lacking sufficient manpower and resources to conduct the trade alone, the French depended on Aboriginal peoples for the harvesting, processing, and transportation of furs, and also for their services as guides and intermediaries. Most critically, the fur trade drew the French into close and constant proximity to Aboriginal peoples. Some of these posts – like those at Quebec, Detroit, and Green Bay – became the nuclei of permanent population centres. Additionally, the fur trade shaped patterns of mobility and settlement in New France through its requirements of an itinerant labour force and inland trading posts. Although its annual value paled in comparison to that of the North Atlantic cod fisheries, the fur trade was nevertheless the economic engine of New France: it underwrote exploration, evangelization, and settlement initiatives while providing income for habitant households and generating private fortunes for officials, merchants, and investors. This enterprise – known by the deceptively simple term “the fur trade” – had complex economic, social, and political dimensions and shaped the French colonial experience in diverse ways. Over this vast tract of the North American continent, the French engaged in an ambitious commercial enterprise designed to meet European demand for fur. Lawrence River Valley in the early seventeenth century, and subsequently to expand into the Great Lakes region, the Mississippi, Ohio, and Illinois River Valleys, and the Hudson Bay watershed. Indeed, it was the lure of this resource that prompted the French to establish a permanent presence in the St. It is difficult to overstate the importance of fur in the historical development of New France.