About 1840, the fur trade began to drop off. Well-dressed men in London, Paris, and New York City wanted silk hats instead of beaver hats. In addition, the mountain men had very nearly killed almost every beaver in North America. Trappers were no longer wanted or needed. Mountain man Robert Newell told Jim Bridger: "[W]e are done with this life in the mountains done with wading in beaver dams, and freezing or starving alternately done with Indian trading and Indian fighting. The fur trade is dead in the Rocky Mountains, and it is no place for us now, if ever it was."