Giant prehistoric beaver, Castoroides Ohioensis, found in Randolph County, Indiana. Length, 6 ft., 2 ½ in. — with fleshy tail, would have measured full seven feet.Joseph Moore Museum, Earlham College, Richmond, Ind. Photo by Susan Castator.
"The beaver does everything well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; and, in short, it makes everything." Indian remark to Father Le Jeune, Jesuit Relations.
FOR more than two hundred years the beaver had been the most important export from America, commercially the most important fur bearer that the world had seen, and the subject of imperial competition and warring by the great powers of Europe. Now at last the beaver received a little attention for himself, not merely the hide he wore. To be sure, the attention was not scientific; that would not come for almost another hundred years, not until 1820, when Kuhl published a description of the Canadian beaver in the British museum and named him at that late day, castor canadensis.
Although still scientifically ignored back in 1738, that year Le Beau's account pictured this castor as a fabulous creature, with fabulous ways fit to stir the councils of Europe and even the most self-centered and foppish courts ever since Cartier first saw the beaver skins and robes of the American Indian. While the romantic stories of Le Beau and his kind could be told and retold elsewhere, the fur men of the wilderness knew the beaver in close detail, knew him better than they knew themselves, because they had studied the castor.
Man was the beaver's only real enemy. Cougars, bobcats, lynxes, wolves, coyotes, bears, wolverines and otters sometimes killed beavers, and even a fox, an eagle or a hawk might take an occasional young kitten. All but the otter had to surprise the beaver on land, while at work or traveling and at his most awkward and helpless. A bear might rip up a house, slavering in his eagerness for the sweet meat, but the smell was usually all he got, the beaver gone. Apparently otters sometimes drained ponds in winter to hunt under the ice, or pursued the beaver in the water, perhaps to be wounded in the attack by the sharp teeth or the powerful slash of the hind claws.
The beaver's eyes are small and probably limited in range but he is very quick to detect movement and his nose is sharp. The short ears, fur-lined, close under water but even there the hearing is keen. The forepaws, small, with fairly long claws, are used like hands for digging and to grasp and hold. The hind paws are very large, sometimes seven inches long, with a spread of five inches, and webbed like the foot of a goose for speed in the water, the toes strong and sharp-clawed. The two inner ones, called combing claws, are drawn through the hair to clean it, and to spread the waterproofing oil of the sacs near the castoreum outlet. A beaver might spend hours combing and smoothing his fur, a pleasant occupation on a lazy afternoon spent on the top of the house in the sun.
The paddle-shaped tail is perhaps the most romanticized portion of the beaver. Contrary to some accounts, it is not used to sled mud to the dam, or as a trowel to apply and spread it. Or to drive stakes. The beaver does not sleep with the tail in the water to feel a drop in the pond level. He detects any breaks in the dam by the noise of rushing water, even while sleeping curled up, snug and dry in his bed of soft grass and fine wood chips.
Romancers liked to picture the beaver sucking air from wood to make it sink, but actually he weights his winter supply down with mud and stones in the bottom of the pond, well below any ice level. He does not fell trees across streams except by accidental leaning. He smells out traps if they are not well concealed but he does not carry a stick to trip them, not even the wiliest whiskered old-timer who has been caught and escaped, despite the credence John Bradbury, the Scottish naturalist, put in such stories told him by hunters during his travels up the Missouri. Stringing the tenderfoot along was an old pastime by 1810.
The Indian was a prudent husbander of the beaver before the white man's tempting goods arrived. The villages lived beside their neighbors in the ponds much like remote Texans might with the self-sustaining herds of Longhorns before there was a market for them. When the Indians needed meat or skins they went out and killed a supply, much as the beavers cut birch and poplar, cottonwood and aspen. Their methods of catching the beavers varied with the region and the season and were intensified as the traders arrived and the appetites they fostered grew.
Some methods were rather widespread, as the trenching with dogs seen by the two bearded men who came to the Indian village at the Old Crossing of the upper Missouri in the 1630's. They might have seen the same kind of hunting as far east as the Micmacs of Nova Scotia. Perhaps all the tribes with icing winters speared beaver when the ponds were covered, either through blow holes or those the hunters cut. Afterward they chopped into the frozen top of a house to scare the beavers out into the water and then stealthily approached the holes, "ahead of your shadow," as the Indians called it, to catch any gentle movement in the water below from beavers breathing. A swift thrust of the spear might take an animal, whether the barb was of bone from the small white whale in the Saguenay River and spread far by trade, or of elk, deer or moose horn or shaped from the lighter, keener-edged iron of the white man.
The head snare, the high noose, was seldom used against animals with thick necks but the beaver was often netted, largely by the fishing tribes, experts in mesh and trammel weaving. Netting required care against the beaver's sharp incisors and his ripping hind claws. Either the animal had to be so enmeshed by his first struggles that he couldn't cut his way out before drowning or the hunter had to be ready to drag the net out and club him on the head.
Indians of wooded regions were expert with the deadfall and sometimes caught beaver that way. These traps were usually set on the dam, the opening facing toward the pond or lake. A frame was made of stakes, often six (three to a side, and tied together with rawhide for firmness), the middle stakes low-forked to hold the crossbar that triggered the heavy, tilted log waiting, with green birch or other favored wood behind the trigger. To reach this bait the beaver stepped on or dragged over the tread bar, sprung the trap and was killed by the falling log.
Because of the weight and the scarcity of properly flexible saplings or trees close enough to beaver workings, there was less use of the spring pole that swung the captured animal off the ground before he could gnaw or more probably twist the foot off. There seems to have been little use of the set arrow, to be released and driven into the prey, against beaver, but the Indians were experts in still-hunting with the bow. Between sundown and darkness on fall evenings beavers come out of their houses and rise to the top of the quiet pond, to leave widening wakes in the sky-bright water toward the shore. Awkwardly they pull themselves out over the chilling bank and feed on the bark of young birch or poplar or willow, aspen or cottonwood. In a large pond or lake the still hunters might move up from the distance but if small they probably launched their canoe earlier on the down-wind side from the houses, to hide in the first shadows of the lowering sun before the beavers began to stir.
Later they came gliding out upon the dusky pond, the paddler making no more noise than the fall of a dead leaf settling upon the water, the hunter, in the prow, ready with an arrow set to the bow and an extra one held in his mouth as he peered into the depths and listened to the movements of the beavers on the shore. With silent hand motions he signaled this way and that, or gave the downward patting that meant drift, stop, and then once more motioned the canoe ahead. Silently they edged through the shadows toward the sound of feeding, the grunts and crunches and soft squashy noises of beavers chewing young twigs on the bank and in the water's edge.
The hunter signaled to let the canoe drift forward. The bowstring twanged and then again. There was a kicking on the shore and a splashing around below it. The hunter leaped out to catch the beaver in the water before he could reach any depths and be lost, dead or alive, while the paddler sent the canoe into the soft bank and sprang out for the one on shore. The plungings and splashings all around the pond were dying, the ripples quieting in the agitated water.
Now the men could talk and laugh in the gathering darkness, for the still hunt was over, as it would have been with spear too, or powder and ball. They had two grown beavers, fat and heavy, the furring dense under the stroking palm. Together they would paddle across the pond, the night already chilling toward the ice of morning.
What the Indian of the beaver regions called his hunting bundle, his medicine bundle used in his ceremonials to bring the game, was sometimes actually carried on the hunt. This often contained a bit of the beaver oil sac—with the thick, cream-colored oil that helps keep the fur glossy and water-shedding. The odor is unpleasant to man but as bait for various traps it draws all other creatures that hunger for the meat of the castor, particularly the lynx but also otters, fishers, martens, mink and that trap robber, the wolverine, the beaver devil, and even the bear, who may chew up a lure stick rubbed with the oil. For the beaver the castoreum of his kind is the best summer or open-water lure. There are even cases of an occasional beaver with a trap on his foot coming to another baited with castoreum.
The sign heaps, near pond or stream and apparently a beaver means of communication, look like foot-wide mud pies about three inches thick with castoreum deposited on the top. There seem to be several theories about these heaps but they are probably territorial warnings, as the dung heaps built up on rises by mustang stallions, and the urine stumps or stone piles of the gray wolves of the prairie, all apparently renewed each time that the animal makes a round of his domain.
Whatever the purpose of the sign heaps, the beaver is drawn to them, and to the castoreum emitted along the banks of ponds or other water. This attraction was apparently not exploited to any extent until the white man came with the urge to kill off whole beaver populations, and infected the Indian. Castoreum was most useful with the steel traps, brought in by the fur men but withheld from the Indians for some time and then generally loaned to them, to keep them tied to the trader-owner. The valuable hide was the one taken from the adult in winter, usually between early November and mid-April, or longer in the northern regions where the ice lasted. In the prime plew the skin underneath is firm and whitish, with all the blue transparency of the summer thinness gone, the fur dense, soft and silky under the long glistening king or guard hairs. There was usually a short time, between the first swift storms of fall and the freeze-over, when traps could be set near the shore where the beavers had been crawling in and out. The trap was placed carefully, in about three inches of water, the chain staked firmly, a space left under the trip or pan for its fall, and then all the iron, including the pan, covered lightly with fine soil sifted from the fingers to settle naturally. The lure was usually a small bit of castoreum left on the bank or in a split-end stick set about ten or twelve inches beyond the trap. In the west and the mountains the castoreum was often pounded with buds of aspen, the top of the lure stick rolled in this as a sort of year-around bait. Every trapper worked out a favorite recipe, usually carried in a bait vial, bait bottle, the Indian's usually modified by suggestions derived from his puberty dreaming or a later fasting time.
Some trappers cut shallow breaks in the top of the beaver dam and set traps in these under about two inches of water, to catch the old ones come out to make repairs. As important, however, as catching the beaver was holding him after he put a foot into the trap. The slender bones of the leg were usually broken by the snap of the iron jaws or in the desperate struggle to get free, and the ligaments and skin twisted off, leaving only the foot behind, and another crippled beaver to live the best he could. Sometimes he fought the trap, perhaps splintering or breaking the sharp yellow incisors, and with his leg twisted off he was free, free but caught in the vaster if slower trap of a tooth that might grow to monstrous length until the beaver died of open-mouthed starvation.
To prevent these losses and the fur damage from long struggles on trap lines that couldn't be run within a few hours after setting, as well as to avoid catching young, under-sized animals, the experienced fur man often set his trap in four to eight inches of water, on a shelf or little bench at the edge of a step-off into a deep place. The trap chain was extended to fifteen or more feet by wire and fastened to a stake, a stone tied close to the trap spring and laid so that the first jerk toppled it into the deep water, to drag the beaver down to drown quickly as well as to hide him from trap robbers—wolverine or man. In regions free of compact, usable rock or stone the trapper might carry deerskin sacks to be filled with earth or gravel and used as the stones would be.
Another and more difficult device for drowning the trapped beaver was the sliding stick or pole, of dry, dead wood, to keep the beavers from gnawing it away before they were caught. The pole might be a thin sapling or cut from a clump of dead diamond willow, always with a few branches to be lopped off at about a half or quarter of an inch from the trunk, leaving little knuckles, small enough to let the trap chain ring slip down over them but not back up. The trap was set as usual but on a short chain, the ring slid over the butt end of the pole, which was thrust, branched end downward, slant-wise into the bottom of the pond, out in perhaps four, five feet of water. Caught, the beaver struggled and dived, his instinctive way out of trouble. The trap ring slid down the stick but not up, and the animal drowned.
The sliding pole was also useful in deep winter. The hunter cut a hole about three feet wide through the ice near the shore and near a house if possible. Then a green swamp magnolia, birch, alder, aspen or young cottownwood tree, branched, about two inches in diameter at the butt, was pressed together and pushed top first through the hole and off under the ice, in the direction that the beavers would pass, the trunk end staked down securely to keep it from being dragged away. If there was no shallow bench or shelf near the anchored butt, a little platform was made with stakes and the trap set on this, covered, the chain or wire of it fastened to the usual sliding pole. Then the hole was roofed over with snow to freeze. The beaver, finding the little green tree, tried to cut it off at the butt, and stepped into the trap. The first jerk loosened the chain or wire ring to slide down in the struggle and the dive. The icy water kept the fur in good condition even if the hunter was several days late running the trap line.
Beavers are skinned open, as it is called, in contrast to such animals as otter, marten, mink or ermine, whose hides are kept cased, closed, and pulled off over the head like an Indian getting out of his buckskin shirt. The beaver skinner turns a thin, pointed knife around each leg just above the foot and around the base of the tail. Then he runs the blade from the foot up the inside of each hind leg to the anal vent and from there up the belly and the breast to the middle of the lower lip, and from each forepaw up the inside of the leg to the center slit at the chest. The skin is loosened at the edges and the legs and pulled off, to be stretched tightly on a circle of willow withe and left to dry a day or so out of the sun. Then the flesh side is carefully scraped of every particle of tissue or fat, the hide hung up on the stretcher to cure and finally be piled away in a cold, dry place for market. East of the buffalo ranges the Indian women sometimes tanned beaver for sale, tanned the skins soft as velour, and these brought a special price, if the Indians could hold out against the lure of alcohol long enough to get the full value.
Sometimes, in the regions where the Hudson's Bay men were in competition with the French and an occasional trader from the British colonies, the Indians got fabulous prices for their furs, prices that were really attempts to drive out the competition, really bribes, as the wily redskin well understood. In August of 1741, Beauharnois, nephew of the governor general, wrote, "The fair sex, among the Hurons with us, has absolute power over the minds of the men." He had a number of fine collars of 1500 porcelain beads made to give to them, with some bags of flour to win them over. The large collar he had been sent was found too white. He was having 1400 black porcelain beads added to it. Evidently the Huron matrons understood their prime bargaining power, with the English not far away.
Rough standards of values had been set up at various trading points almost from the start, always with the beaver the unit of currency. For instance, one fat winter-prime adult beaver hide usually had the trade value of each of the following:
| 3 martens | 2 ordinary otters |
| 1 fox | (1 if exceptionally fine) |
| 1 moose | 2 deerskins |
| 1 weejack (fisher) | 1 lb. castoreum |
| 1 bear cub | 10 lbs. feathers |
| 2 queequehatches | 8 moose hoofs |
| (wolverines) | 4 fathoms of netting |
One good black bear hide was worth two beaver skins.
The Hudson's Bay Company established the value of their trade goods at the various forts, particularly the main ones, with more flexibility permitted at the little outposts, as the one on the Red River. In 1733 at Moose River on James Bay, made-beaver, an adult prime hide in good condition, paid for any one of the following: ½ lb. beads, le milk; ¾ lb. beads, colored; 1 brass kettle; 1 lb. lead, black; 1 ½ lb. gunpowder or 2 lbs. sugar. Near Fort York and up at Churchill, both farther up Hudson's Bay, the price of trade goods was increased because the French were remote, although these posts were much farther, by pack and paddle, for all but the tribes west of the Red River.
The Indians arrived at these posts with their long strings of loaded summer canoes and were taken into the trading room one at a time, where a clerk or trader separated the bundles of furs into piles by variety and condition, estimated in made-beaver. For these the Indian received little pieces of wood. Later these were grooved to represent numbers of beaver, say one to ten, to simplify the process.
With his pouch full of these tally sticks the Indian was taken to the store room to wander along the aisles of bales and bundles, boxes and barrels of goods: blankets and slop coats; guns, lead, powder and flints; knives and axes; tea and sugar; paint, beads and so on, at fixed prices. A slop coat might be twelve made-beaver, a gun twenty or more, a knife two. Usually the Indian had requests from the women of his family at home or some maiden of his fancy, perhaps a deerskin list, the items in picture writing. These might be long meat knives, kettles, vermilion, finery. Often there was the rum of the company to be considered first, particularly at the competitive posts, although there was apparently no repetition of the appalling drunkenness common at the Montreal fur fairs or at the later trapper rendezvous of the far west.
Not that the Hudson's Bay outfit was without blame. Complaints and petitions were general around London and Parliament, growing in insistence during the 1730's and 1740's. When the company applied for reconfirmation of the charter, back shortly after the accession of William III, in 1688, during the period of fantastic profits, there was opposition by Feltmakers Company and again seven years later, also unsuccessfully. The glutted market around 1700 and the colonial wars quieted the opposition but in 1737 there was a more determined attack on the charter, led by Arthur Dobbs, who gave a glowing picture of the interior of North America and the lucrative trade that could be opened by London merchants. He called the Hudson's Bay Company unenterprising and repeated the charge that no attempt was made to discover the passage to the south sea. His Irish eloquence, describing the advantage of a northwest passage, got orders from the Lords of the Admiralty to Captain Middleton, formerly of the company, to search for the passage. When he failed, Dobbs attacked him, and Parliament voted a £20,000 reward for the discovery of such a route. Dobbs led a campaign for public subscription of £10,000 to finance the new voyage, but the attempt failed.
Now Arthur Dobbs extended his charges against the Bay Company to include neglect in fostering the settlements required by the charter, abuse of the Indians, neglect of the forts, ill-treatment of company servants and encouragement of the French. The company submitted a detailed list of vessels sent out along the northern coast—to draw attention from their unaccountable neglect for eighty years, some accused, of their fabulous domain in the interior. About this they had done practically nothing while the French pushed clear out to the Missouri and beyond, Frenchmen who wrote of their journeys, no matter how dubious the accounts. It was apparently true that the company had tried to get men out to explore but no one wanted to stir from the Bay posts, no one except the traders eager for hides.
In 1748 Dobbs, spokesman for a commercial combine, presented a petition to the Parliamentary Committee for privileges in America similar to those of Hudson's Bay, offering to undertake extensive colonization and the explorations never made by the company. In rebuttal to this the directors had offered A Journal of a Voyage and Journey by Henry Kellsey,1 to discover and endeavor to bring "to a commerce the Naywatanee Poets," dated 1691, which was attacked by Joseph Robson. He was a stone mason who had built Fort Prince of Wales at Churchill, and wrote under the title "Late Surveyor and Supervisor of the Buildings to the Hudson's-Bay Company." He had been induced to return to the bay from England in 1744-47 and believed that this was done to keep him from getting to Dobbs. Others added color to the charges by saying that Kelsey had lived several seasons among the Indians of the interior, but as a refugee from the Hudson's Bay Company.
With Kelsey safely dead since 1730, Robson's account of his six years' residence at Hudson's Bay and his comment in 1752, "I no more believe that it is Kelsey's than it is mine," brought more doubt upon the journal. In the handsome 250th-anniversary volume of the Hudson's Bay Company, their spokesman says that they made a "fairly effective reply" to the charges about the Northwest Passage but were less convincing on the development of their territory. That their defense was a little shaky was admitted in 1820, when, during the struggle with the North West Company, they feared revival of the charges made in 1737-49. It seems plain that during the eighty years of their fur monopoly the company had been content with the profits and did little to develop the region or to push trade, and yet refused to let others in. The company won, but rumors of cheated Indians and flogged servants persisted. True, everybody cheated Indians and flogging was common in Europe and America; even an occasional woman still felt the sting of the cat at Montreal and elsewhere.
After the inquiry of 1749 and the end of another war between France and England, the Hudson's Bay Company spurred itself to a policy of imperialism; not subject to the same government control as the British colonies, the company moved against the French traders in both the east and the west and southward. Not that this was all new. The impression given during the investigations was not completely just. Since late in the 17th century men went out from the main posts to channel furs toward the Bay, men as far as Turtle Mountain and west, out toward the headwaters of the Saskatchewan and down along the Rockies. The lauded westward thrust of the French was less initiative than pure necessity. As they destroyed the beaver they had to move on to remain in business at all.
After the Verendrye expeditions, the trade of their region declined. The Sioux returned to the warpath and, partly to avoid them, the Crees once more took the furs of their catch and trade over the long water haul to Hudson's Bay. Hostile Indians destroyed the Verendrye posts of La Reine and Maurepas and in 1750 what remained to the family was rapidly being expropriated. A so-called expert in Indians and the fur trade undertook to stop the Sioux war, placate the Crees and get the hunting started once more. He failed in everything but did send a man to build a post on some far tributary of the Southern Saskatchewan, to compete with the Bay Company in their trade among the Blackfeet. More disasters fell upon the French, from the Sioux, from the Crees who destroyed posts and from the competition and the government, to whom the small trader was still often a sort of bush loper, although out in new regions he had his usual success with the natives. Another little post was started for the Blackfeet and the Assiniboins, with men pushing down toward the headwaters of the Missouri and sifting through the passes to the ancient Indian trade fairs in the summer mountain valleys draining westward.
Then suddenly the trade goods no longer reached the outposts in the spring and some of the newer bush lopers didn't discover for years that in 1754 another French and Indian war against the English had started, drawing men and resources from the posts of the west, and with them all French control forever. During these years some of the bush lopers, particularly the mixed-bloods, not only became more solidly members of the tribes of their wives but had gone over to the G-string completely.
In the meantime Graham, factor of the Bay's York fort, had started Anthony Hendry (or Henday) to the western Indians. Hendry was young and new to the country but he went a thousand miles inland without a white companion, to the upper South Saskatchewan country, where the company still claimed Kelsey had been. Apparently the directors did not know that Hendry was outlawed for smuggling in England. They gave him a valuable supply of trade goods. He was to be free-handed with presents and to undersell the French. His journal, graphic, easily followed, a unique quality in such writings, shows him pleased with what he saw: a wide, promising country, with great buffalo herds and the Blackfeet tribe, who far excelled other Indians. They were well-mounted, with pack horses, were good firemakers, carrying a black stone that they used as flint and a kind of ore for the steel, a well-fed, orderly, hospitable people. They made slaves of captives, the young ones adopted into families who had lost children, but it seemed to him that they tortured the aged of both sexes.
Unfortunately these Blackfeet killed game mostly for their own needs, taking only ten beavers when they might have killed 200. Hendry bought beaver, wolf and fox hides from them, wintered in their villages and made friends but he had to hear their complaints about the long killing journey to the Bay. They were not canoe men, they said, with perhaps a little of that general contempt of the Plains people for the water-bound.
South and east of the Blackfeet the Indians remained more or less loyal to the Frenchmen. Each summer from 1754 to the surrender of Canada war parties from as far west as the Missouri and the Plains beyond went to join Charles Langlade, the mixed-blood trader of Green Bay, leading a breed and Indian force against the British. He was credited with planning the ambush of Braddock's troops, where over 900 were reported dead and wounded, including sixty-three of the eighty-nine officers, killed trying to rally the soldiers who were running away. Many more would have died if Langlade's Indians had not stopped to do a little scalping and jerking red coats off. Two years later they defeated a raiding party of Rogers Rangers, and many served in the Quebec campaign under Montcalm in 1759. Each year other young Indian warriors had gone east, to replace those who came home with stories that would grow into vague, cloudy legends, with coats of red cloth that would fade too, and yield their wool to hungry crickets.
With the surrender of Canada in 1760, the Hudson's Bay Company moved to consolidate what had been taken over from the retreating French traders. In 1761 the company once more petitioned the Crown to have their southern boundary moved down to the 49th parallel, and plainly with no intention of stopping there, although French cession of Louisiana to Spain to keep it out of English hands might be a temporary barrier. The treaty of 1763 put most of the beaver regions of the world if not under actual British control at least by infiltration and design under British influence. The vast territory west of the Mississippi, very rich in robes and fur, was technically Spanish but with little show of interest or power. The hope of an absolute charter to the 49th parallel and eventually over the Spanish fur territories—a monopoly of the earth's supply of beaver—was "aiming high and taking a good lead," as the old hunters used to say, but the quarry was worth the powder.
Because the French traders and trappers had a long and intricate family relationship with the Indians (one man often with wives in serveral tribes) those who wanted to work during the war had been given a friendly hearing by the Hudson's Bay officials. But some remained out even after 1763, the Bay men reporting that a few old "Pedlars from Quebec" as they called them, were still living in the French houses of the Saskatchewan region. In 1765 Louis Primo (probably Primeau) found his way to York Factory, complaining of his hardship with the Indians the last five, six years, perhaps because he had no trade goods and could not explain the reason. The post journal described Primo as a native of Quebec, talkative, illiterate, "compleat master of the Indian language," although one might have asked: which one—Cree, Sioux, Blackfeet or Assiniboin?
Primo was hired and was probably useful in the company's system of watching any opposition, now largely those Pedlars from Quebec, including an increasing number of Scotsmen from Montreal. Everything seen and heard of the competition was entered in the required journals and diaries. The master at Moose River reported that the Indians had found the English "thick as Muskettos" on the Nottaway River, also flowing into James Bay—but not company English. Pontiac's uprising stopped the lake traffic for a while, with probably many killed trying to get through, but as soon as the Indians were defeated the St. Lawrence traders once more followed the sweet smell of the castor westward, seeking unspoiled fields.
The post journals of the Hudson's Bay Company during the 1760's contain the Indian names, in a sort of phonetic spelling, of an assortment of old-time French traders and trappers still found in the west, some traceable by their licenses but more without paper. The man called Saswaw was recorded as Francis Sirdaw, probably the France-way of the fur business, for thirty years in the upper country and known to the Indians as Saswee. It seemed that in 1768 he occupied a trader place one day's paddle below the later Finlay House on the Saskatchewan, and before that was at Old French House, another day's work down the river. Evidently he was a real irritation to the Bay force in the Saskatchewan region to 1776, perhaps because he joined the new men coming out of Montreal, finally serving as guide and trader for Todd and McGill.
But Franceway was only one of the many Canadians scattered over the wilderness gathering furs for market as the routes reopened. Most of them restored their connection with Montreal through the new merchants but some turned their faces, at least their bullboats of furs from the Blackfeet and neighboring tribes, southward on the spring floods, perhaps from near the headwaters of the Missouri or through the passes from beyond, all knowing that there must still be French merchants somewhere down the river, even if it was the far New Orleans, and in Spanish hands.
The political peace of 1763 brought no commercial peace to the Hudson's Bay Company. To be sure the rival traders were all small, their take seldom more than a few loaded canoes, but the combined result could be significant. There were stirrings toward a formal organization down on the St. Lawrence in 1776 but the rebellion of the American colonies brought arms to the lake routes, closed them. In 1784 a group of the most efficient traders of Montreal started the North West Company. This was a remarkable combination of genius, energy and business acumen. In the meantime, at the mouth of the Missouri, in the growing little settlement named St. Louis, a young man was developing into a major figure in the fur trade of the west, while in Scotland a boy yet to be born would some day not only head the Hudson's Bay Company but become its knighted symbol. At times there would be desperate competition between the Scotsman and the son of the young trader from St. Louis, each to become ambitious under the ruthless spur of an illegitimate name.
Giant prehistoric beaver, Castoroides Ohioensis, found in Randolph County, Indiana. Length, 6 ft., 2 ½ in. — with fleshy tail, would have measured full seven feet.Joseph Moore Museum, Earlham College, Richmond, Ind. Photo by Susan Castator.
Inset from Herman Moll's "Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain," 1709-1720. The World Described.
THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY'S BEAVER TOKEN.
The N.B. was engraved by error—should have been M.B. for "made-beaver," value one large adult, winter-prime hide, or the equivalent.
Pierre La Verendrye's expedition to search for the Western Sea, and furs, leaving Montreal, 1731. N. Y. Public Library Picture Collection.
Hidatsa (called Minnetaree on picture) village of Upper Missouri, painted by George Catlin. Smithsonian Institution.
Trapping for Beaver. Note simplified sketch of steel trap, later perfected by Newhouse. N. Y. Public Library Picture Collection.
Pawnee council at Major Long's Expedition encampment, overlooking Missouri River, 1819-1820; drawn by Samuel Seymour.
CLOSED
Sketch of modern trap for catching beaver uninjured, to be transported to regions where dams will hold back run-off water, prevent soil erosion and stabilize streams. Planes parachute-drop beavers, in pairs, in such regions as the Big Horn Mountains.
But in 1784 there were still a few remote regions where the beaver went his quiet, industrious way, undisturbed.
1 See The Kelsey Papers, listed in the Bibliography.
