21 May 2001
I happened to read Wilma Dunaway's "Women at risk: capitalist incorporation and community transformation on the Cherokee frontier" in Hall's World-Systems Reader and started thinking about the southern Appalachians as a case for Human Geography. A search for other materials by Dunaway led me to a (somewhat mixed, but very useful) review of her The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860 . Dunaway has a number of papers on the Web which cover the same territory, including
 THE SOUTHERN FUR TRADE AND THE INCORPORATION OF SOUTHERN APPALACHIA INTO THE WORLD-ECONOMY, 1690-1763 and  Women/ Labor/ Nature: Rethinking Capitalist Incorporation from a Radical Ecofeminist Perspective . A review by a sociologist is less critical: "I cannot recommend these books more highly for anyone looking for quick primers in the best and most recent historical research on the real Appalachia." (also Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century Pudup et al. eds. F217.A65 A654 1995 )

There's quite a lot on the Web about the deerskin trade, including pointers to a chapter on the deerskin trade in

Usner, Daniel H
Indians, settlers, & slaves in a frontier exchange economy : the Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783
Chapel Hill : Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University
of North Carolina Press, c1992
 Leyburn-Level 4 F352 .U86 1992

and  OCCANEECHI TOWN , and archaeological site connected to the deerskin trade... and see also  Eno-Occaneechi Indian Association pages, and  Excavating Occaneechi Town ... see also

Braund, Kathryn E. Holland, 1955-
Deerskins & duffels : the Creek Indian trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815 / Kathryn E. Holland Braund
Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, c1993
Leyburn-Level 4 E99.C9 B73 1993