Fashion often drives the market to the detriment of wildlife. The craze for beaver hats in the early 19th century created the Fur Trade in the United States and Canada. It was a wild time of mountain men, rendezvous, and near decimation of the beaver in North America.
Thankfully, the beaver hat fell out of style, and the beaver came back from the edge of extinction.
A century later, wildlife was once again at risk in North America.
The aigrette, a fashionable arrangement of feathers taken from Florida egrets and great blue herons, was in high demand, driven by the glamorous female movie stars of the black-and-white, silent film era. The herons were damaged by the fashion trend, but the Florida egret, once a bird numbering in the millions, was reduced to just 500 breeding pairs by the early 1900s. Thanks to conservation efforts, they’re once again thriving in the Everglades.
The story of the silver fox, at least in its wild state, took a different turn.
It was fashion that once again threatened these animals. The silver fox isn’t a unique species, but a mutation of the much larger red fox. Red foxes, like the coyote, are found in all 48 contiguous states and thrive in Alaska. They are even more widespread in Canada.
In the 1890s, silver fox coats and stoles began appearing on the wives of eastern industrialists, the “Robber Barons” who monopolized the American economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
These garments were made of extremely rare silver fox, trapped primarily in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. They were status symbols since one stole could cost $3,000 or more, and a coat at least $10,000. To put it in perspective, that’s $10,000 to $350,000 in today’s dollars.
Rather than drive the silver fox to extinction, trappers became breeders.
Charles Dalton and Robert Oulton established the first modern, commercially successful silver fox ranch around 1895 on Prince Edward Island.
Trappers had occasionally discovered black and silver-colored pups among litters of common red foxes, and these rare animals became the foundation of a new industry. Because of their striking sheen and rarity, silver fox pelts were highly prized, and a good breeding pair could sell for thousands of dollars.
A typical silver fox farm consisted of a large yard enclosed by a wire fence with an overhang to prevent escape, since foxes are wild animals capable of climbing and digging. They never became tame, often snarling or yapping even at those who cared for them. Inside the yard were individual pens built from wire mesh and wood, each with a dirt floor over wire and a nesting box for shelter. These boxes provided warmth in winter and a safe place for mothers to raise their pups in the spring.
Foxes were usually ready to breed at about two years of age. Mating pairs were placed together in special pens until the female became pregnant, after which she was moved to a separate enclosure for closer observation. In early spring, she would give birth to a litter of three to six pups. These young animals represented both investment and profit.
When a silver pair mated, they almost always produced a full litter of silver kits.
They were carefully protected. Sometimes, a mother would abandon her newborns, even carrying them out onto the snow. When this happened, farmers would find a nursing cat to care for the kits until they were old enough to survive on their own.
Once the kits could eat solid food and drink milk, they were moved into larger pens in the yard to grow and become breeding stock. The pens were arranged in numbered rows, with paths between them for feeding and cleaning. The entire enclosure was secured by a locked main gate.
By fall, the foxes’ fur reached its prime condition. At that point, they were harvested for their pelts, which were cured and sold to furriers in New York as well as to local buyers.
The foxes were given a special diet that included cereal, meat, fish, and plenty of fresh water. They were also regularly fed horse meat, along with organ meats like liver and heart.
Dalton and Oulton became wealthy, not from selling the pelts but from selling breeding pairs to prospective fox farms across the United States and Canada.
A good breeding pair could bring $15,000, over half-a-million dollars today.
The demand was entirely fashion-based.
Fox coats, capes, and stoles were most popular during the 1920s and 30s. Hollywood’s Golden Age, when movie stars gained cult-like followings, fueled the demand for silver fox.
While the end product was paraded on Madison Avenue in New York and in Burbank, Beverly Hills and Hollywood in California, the production end of the business took place in cold, isolated areas of the United States and Canada.
Prince Edward Island anchored the trade in the east, and the tiny hamlet of Kasilof on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula was the center for raising silver foxes in the west.
Kasilof in the 1920s was far from high society. There were only a handful of year-round residents. It was a place without roads, stores, or even a post office. Mail arrived by dog sled in the winter, but it was an excellent place to raise fox fur.
The colder the climate, the better the quality of the fur.
Fox farming was highly profitable and soon began to grow around the Great Lakes and in the Rocky Mountains. Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota anchored the trade in the Old Northwest, while Wyoming and Montana were the center of it in the Rockies.
By 1927, the average silver fox pelt had dropped to $112, still lucrative with a modern value of $2,100 but far less than 30 years before. The price drop represented the increase in pelts due to the expansion of commercial fox farms.
Wyoming’s first fox farm came in 1923 at Fin Harrison’s ranch at Circle. Circle was a small community southeast of Dubois. Harrison was an enterprising rancher, selling hay to the Wyoming Tie and Timber Company to feed mules and draft horses as woodcutters hauled logs off the mountain.
He learned of the tremendous return on successful silver fox farming and headed to the Great Lakes to learn more.
Riverton Review – January 3, 1923
HARRISON WILL NOW
TRY FOX FARMING
“F. B. Harrison of Circle has just returned from a trip to Michigan and Wisconsin where he has been making a comprehensive study of the fox farming industry with a view to engaging in it himself next year. He has been reading the government bulletins and all other information he could gather for the past two years or more, but decided to have a little first-hand information from people actually engaged in the industry before deciding if he cared to give it a trial.
He first attended the Fox show at Muskegon, Michigan, where more than 400 foxes and a fine collection of furs were shown, and later visited a number of fox farms in Wisconsin.
He found that the foxes are best kept in a woven wire enclosure 130 feet in circumference and from 7 to 12 feet high. The wire is also buried in the ground a foot or two, or else a carpet of the same is laid around the inside of the enclosure to keep the foxes from burrowing out. A group of pens is then enclosed by a guard fence around the entire tract as a further preventative against escape. These precautions are necessary because a single pair of silver foxes is worth from $1,300 to $2,300.
Each pair is kept in a single pen where one litter of puppies ranging from two to four is raised each year. The young foxes selected for pelting are killed by chloroform at either one or two years of age and their skins bring from $400 to $900 each.
It is estimated that the food for each pair costs on an average of $24 per year. It consists chiefly of raw meat and cooked vegetables, such as carrots, turnips, etc.
The breeders have a strong association known as the American Fox Breeders Association and every animal must be carefully graded before it can be registered. It must make 83 points out of a possible 100 before being eligible to registry.
Stock raising and general farming have not been very profitable and Mr. Harrison has bought one pair of live foxes for delivery next fall and will embark on the business as soon as he can construct the proper pens on his ranch. The silver fox pays better than any other as their pelts cannot be counterfeited as can those of the black fox and others which are often merely coyotes that have been dyed and treated
Fremont County ranchmen will watch Mr. Harrison’s experiment with interest since this will be an experiment that may develop into a large and paying industry in Fremont County.”’
Constructing fox pens was a challenging process. A wild fox can run vertically up a sheer wall for dozens of feet, and they burrow as well as prairie dogs or badgers. To compensate for the escape abilities, woven wire had to be buried two to three feet underground, with an eight- to 10-foot-tall perimeter fence that leaned inward at a 45-degree angle at the top.
It’s difficult enough in soft ground, at Circle, where there was just a thin layer of soil over the top of hardpan or compressed gravel, it was working with a pick and a digging bar.
Harrison was the first, but five more soon arrived in Wyoming.
There were fox farms at Kemmerer, Afton, Cody, Casper and nearby Riverton.
Building the enclosure, pens, and outbuildings was a much smaller outlay financially than purchasing the breeding pair. After a successful litter, the pups weren’t harvested for a couple of years to build up the breeding stock, but a new dog had to be introduced to prevent genetic problems from inbreeding to the vixens. Some fox farmers purchased additional vixens but that was more costly than bringing in a new dog.
Feeding the growing fox kits and the breeding pairs was another challenge. Though the industry is considered brutal and cruel by today’s standards, it wasn’t in the 1920s and 30s.
Veterinarians and animal nutritionists were employed to keep the animals robust and healthy throughout their life cycles.
Feeding the foxes was a never-ending process. Farmers would catch fish, hunt and trap rabbits and porcupines, and use goats, dead horses, cattle, and sheep for meat.
Harrison fed his animals fish from nearby Trail and Ring Lake, lost calves, and aging horses. Fox ranching quickly spread across the state over the next six years.
Wyoming State Journal – August 25, 1926
FOX RAISING BECOMES
BIG STATE RESOURCE
“Plans have been completed for the sixth Wyoming fox farm and it looks as if Wyoming is to have another paying industry. Kemmerer was selected by G. L. Morrison, veteran fox raiser of Alaska and Wyoming. Mr. Morrison has spent over twenty years in Alaska and has had an opportunity to learn the industry from one end to the other.
Mr. Morrison is to be associated with E. M. Barrus of Afton, Wyoming, who knows the fox raising business as applied to Wyoming conditions and climates. These two men are supported by three banks in Kemmerer and have the support of the Kemmerer business men.
J. T. Wells, an Afton banker who has been interested for several years in fox farming, will go to Kemmerer to be the active manager of the farm. These men are making plans to establish other farms in Wyoming and plan to establish branches of their business in Laramie, Cheyenne, and Evanston.”
The popularity of fox farming was unprecedented. It surpassed anything the fur trade of a century before could have hoped for and made much more money on much smaller acreages than either cattle or sheep ranching had done in Wyoming from 1880 to 1925.
With anything so profitable, it had to come to an end through overproduction. By 1923, there were 450 fox farms in the United States with 13,000 breeding foxes. In 1929, the fox industry had an estimated value of $80,000,000 in production animals.
Breeding shows, national competitions, and expositions began to highlight the lucrative fox fur industry in the early 1920s. It was the best advertising breeders could hope for.
The end of the fox empires came in jolting stages.
The collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929 ended many fortunes, and the desire to show off your wealth by having your wife or girlfriend parade around in expensive furs lost its luster.
In 1931, the average silver fox pelt fell to $90; a year later, they brought only $44. It still meant almost $850 per pelt in modern terms, but it barely covered feed and housing costs, and the potential buyers were in financial distress as well.
In 1935, Earle Simple, a fox farmer in Kensington, Alaska, was offered just $800 for a prime breeding dog, and his pelts sold for just $35 each that year.
Late arrivals like the Cody Fox Farm, established in 1928 by Mark Weaver, and the Riverside Fox Farm, north of Riverton, established in 1929, barely got off the ground before the market began to fail.
The Cody Fox Farm began with 10 breeding pairs in 1928 and grew to 2,000 by 1941, but the market was drying up.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it meant war for the United States and an end to fashionable fox coats and stoles nationwide.
An interesting side business came when a fox farm began operation. There was a demand for meat, but also a demand for lactating house cats.
In the wild, vixens are among the most protective and clandestine mothers. They hunt for their litter, defend the den, and move the kits stealthily if danger approaches. In captivity, they are not nearly as maternal.
After a litter arrived, it was not uncommon for the mother to abandon her kits. Sometimes she carried them outside her house and left them in the snow to die.
When a rancher discovered the shivering kits, he scooped them up, found an amiable house cat, and bonded the kits to the feline. The mother cat let the kits nurse as if they were her own until they were big enough to survive on cows’ milk and meat.
Fur of all kinds was popular in the 1920s. Rabbit fur was used to line gloves, jackets, and to create “faux fur” jackets and coats that were dyed to resemble more expensive mink, fox, and ermine coats.
There was a rabbit ranch in Uinta County at Carter that harvested thousands of rabbit pelts each month. At first, the meat was thrown away, but soon a better use was found in Rock Springs, Ogden, Salt Lake, and Ft Bridger.
Shoshoni Enterprise – May 3, 1929
“More than 26,000 rabbit skins have been shipped from Carter since early in the winter, according to reports reaching Lyman. There have been several thousand sent out of the valley by truck to Rock Springs, Salt Lake and Ogden. The skins brought an average price of 22 cents apiece or $6,500 for the entire lot. This does not include the meat sold to the Fort Bridger fox farm.”
The Cody Fox Farm changed its name to the Buffalo Bill Fur Farm. The White Grass Ranch in Jackson began fox farming in 1928 and the Harden Ranch at Rawlins was one of the last to enter the business in 1929.
Wild fox populations are high in Teton, Fremont, and Park Counties today, with a substantial number of silver foxes appearing within the larger red fox population. Many believe this high incidence of silver fox is linked to animals that escaped from fox ranches in the 1940s.
Perhaps the last fox farm came about between Saratoga and Encampment in late 1937.
Saratoga Sun – December 16, 1937
“A new type of business in the Platte Valley will soon get underway, when three pairs of highly bred silver foxes will be brought in from Rawlins and established in the Upper Spring Creek country as the nucleus of a farm.
Joe and Neal Harden this week purchased three pairs of the animals. They were purchased from Joe Garry of Denver and are being cared for at a fox farm near Rawlins.
The local farm will be established on Harden’s ranch on Heather Creek, the former Heather Creek Ranger Station.
The ranch is ideally located for a venture of this sort, and a load of building materials were taken out today to be used in the construction of proper pens and quarters for the foxes. As soon as the pens are completed, the foxes will be moved from Rawlins to the ranch, probably within the next 10 days or two weeks.
Harden also plans to raise fish on his ranch and has recently completed the construction of one large pond near his house. Two or three other ponds will be built along the creek. The completed pond has been stocked with brook trout.”
It went bust quickly. The markets were gone, prices were inflated, and the heyday of silver fox fur was gone.
Fashion changed, the market collapsed, and public sentiment changed. “Fur is murder” became the slogan beginning in the 1970s.
The glory days were gone in just three generations. Like the beaver and the egret before it, fashion had created the boom, and then quietly ended it.