Fur-bearing animals were plentiful around Otter Tail Lake and Otter Tail County when French fur trappers arrived in the early 1700's, and Native Americans skillfully hunted and trapped animals whose pelts they bartered with European Americans for goods such as kettles, knives, guns, cloth, sugar, flour, and liquor in a trade that became known as the fur trade. Beaver pelts, many from Minnesota, were especially valuable because felt hats were popular in Europe from the 1600s through the early 1800s, but heavy demand caused beaver to decline and muskrat pelts became more important; in 1835 sixty muskrat skins could buy a blanket or tin kettle, while a gun cost one hundred skins. French voyageurs formed the backbone of this trade, carrying goods and furs by birchbark canoe, with beginners known as pork-eaters and more experienced winterers spending winters at interior posts trading for furs; they used Chippewa birchbark canoes that could carry about 3,000 pounds, were usually twenty-five feet long, and were manned by crews of eight, while the voyageurs paddled long hours and crossed portages carrying heavy packs. Otter Tail Lake, Leaf Lake, and the Otter Tail River were important links in a canoe route connecting the Red River and Canada to the Mississippi River chain and Fort Snelling, with the only long portage running from Otter Tail Lake to the Leaf Lakes. Fur companies established trading posts in the area, including a Northwest Fur Company post at the east end of Otter Tail Lake in 1797, the British Fur Trading Co. on the Leaf River in 1806, and the Columbia Fur Company at Leaf Lake in 1862. Too much trapping, new fashions, the Civil War, and the Indian Uprising of 1862 damaged the fur trade, and by the mid 1800s its best days had passed as agriculture became more important after the war. In 1750 the first explorers in the area met a band of natives on the shore of Lac de la Queue de la Outer, or Lake of the Otter's Tail, a name derived from the sand bar shaped like an otter's tail where the Otter Tail River enters the lake.