Fur's significance in New France's historical development cannot be overstated. The French were in fact drawn by this resource to settle permanently in the St. Lawrence River Valley at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and they later expanded into the Great Lakes region, the Mississippi, Ohio, and Illinois River Valleys, as well as the Hudson Bay watershed. The French undertook an extensive economic endeavor across this huge region of North America in order to satisfy European demand for fur. The complex economic, social, and political components of this enterprise—known by the deceptively straightforward title "the fur trade"—shaped the French colonial experience in a variety of ways. Despite the fact that it had a much lower annual value than that