Beaver Page
At first glance, this may seem like an unusual page to find on a site dedicated to Pocahontas, but in the past year or so, I've been intrigued by aspects of the Pocahontas story that are connected to Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, The obvious connection is the beaver hat that Pocahontas is shown to be wearing in the Van de Passe engraving, the only image made from life of Pocahontas. We don't know what Pocahontas thought of that hat, or even if she realized it had been manufactured from the fur of beaver, but no one in Europe at the time could have known the coming effect of the beaver trade on Indian life in North America. Trappers and traders spread out across all parts of North America in search of furs, bringing weapons, tools, new ways of life, new alliances, and tragically, fatal diseases to the indigenous people. Furthermore, the extermination of beaver led to massive changes in the environment and animal diversity, which in turn made the landscape unsuited for traditional Indian life in many places. When people speak of how Indians were driven from their lands, we may imagine that this was always at the point of a gun. However, we should also understand, that when a people's life is upended by significant changes in the environment, people are forced to adapt or vanish. The Indians in North America did some of both.
On this page, I will attempt to introduce some information related to how the disappearance of beaver impacted North America. The majority of my information comes from the book Eager: Beavers Matter, by Ben Goldfarb (2018). Not everything on this page is directly related to the east coast Indians, but I believe many of the circumstances from other locations have relevance to the east coast as well, though I'm unclear on how to quantify the degree of similarity.
On this page, I will attempt to introduce some information related to how the disappearance of beaver impacted North America. The majority of my information comes from the book Eager: Beavers Matter, by Ben Goldfarb (2018). Not everything on this page is directly related to the east coast Indians, but I believe many of the circumstances from other locations have relevance to the east coast as well, though I'm unclear on how to quantify the degree of similarity.
The Middle Plantation Treaty of 1677
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"It is hereby concluded, consented to and mutually agreed as follows:
... XVI. That every King and Queen in the month of March every year with some of their great men tender their obedience to the Right Honorable his Majesties Governor at the place of his residence, whenever it shall be, and then and there pay the accustomed rent of twenty beaver skins, to the Governor and also their quit rent aforesaid, in acknowledgement that they hold the Crowns, and Lands of the great King of England." |
My comment:
After Bacon's Rebellion, several tribes from among the remaining Powhatan Indians in the Chesapeake area entered into an agreement with the English that was supposed to guarantee their lands in exchange for them becoming tributary subjects of the English crown. Cockacoeske, queen of the Pamunkey tribe was the leader of the Indian delegation and one of the signatories. There were 22 articles agreed to in the treaty, and as shown above, in Article 16, twenty beaver skins were to be paid annually to the Governor of Virginia. Later, when beaver became too scarce, payment changed to deer carcasses, the official presentation of which continues to this day.
That the Indians were to pay 20 beaver skins in Virginia from 1677 is an indication that there were still plenty of beaver in the area at that time. However, with both Indians and European trappers combing the lands and waterways for beaver, it didn't take long for the supply to run out.
Full text of treaty (Articles of Peace, 1677; Article XVI) at Encyclopedia Virginia
After Bacon's Rebellion, several tribes from among the remaining Powhatan Indians in the Chesapeake area entered into an agreement with the English that was supposed to guarantee their lands in exchange for them becoming tributary subjects of the English crown. Cockacoeske, queen of the Pamunkey tribe was the leader of the Indian delegation and one of the signatories. There were 22 articles agreed to in the treaty, and as shown above, in Article 16, twenty beaver skins were to be paid annually to the Governor of Virginia. Later, when beaver became too scarce, payment changed to deer carcasses, the official presentation of which continues to this day.
That the Indians were to pay 20 beaver skins in Virginia from 1677 is an indication that there were still plenty of beaver in the area at that time. However, with both Indians and European trappers combing the lands and waterways for beaver, it didn't take long for the supply to run out.
Full text of treaty (Articles of Peace, 1677; Article XVI) at Encyclopedia Virginia
Frequently seen quote on how beaver extermination led to faster European settlement
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“The whole tract, which before was the bottom of a pond, is covered with wild grass, which grows as high as a man’s shoulders… Without these natural meadows, many settlements could not possibly have been made.”
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My comment:
This quote is sometimes attributed to a nameless colonial era settler, but I recently found it attributed to a Jeremy Belknap in Literary and Biographical Magazine, and British Review, Volume 12 (1794). The original article was entitled, "Account of the Beaver." The meadows in question seem to relate to those found in New England, but I see no reason why the same principle couldn't have applied to Virginia as well.
This quote is sometimes attributed to a nameless colonial era settler, but I recently found it attributed to a Jeremy Belknap in Literary and Biographical Magazine, and British Review, Volume 12 (1794). The original article was entitled, "Account of the Beaver." The meadows in question seem to relate to those found in New England, but I see no reason why the same principle couldn't have applied to Virginia as well.
Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter - Ben Goldfarb (2018) ISBN-9781603589086
Some quotes from Eager:Beavers Matter, by Ben Goldfarb (2018), with foreword by Dan Flores.
Re. the significant difference between pre- and post- beaver trade habitat:
Re. Rocky Mountain beaver exploitation:
Re. how trumpeter swans relied on beaver habitat:
My comment:
After some checking, it appears unlikely that trumpeter swans relied on Virginia beaver habitat for breeding as described in the above, which specifically refers to swans in the Northern Rockies. Swans may have wintered in Virginia, but there may not have been swan nests on beaver lodges there. However, other birds and animals would certainly have benefited from beaver habitat, as will be shown further down. [Link to Swan Controversy is no longer active; http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~insrisg/nature/swans.html]
Re. the pre-colonial environment/ecosystem:
Re. biodiversity:
Re. water retention:
Re. the unseen benefits of beaver-caused chaos and disorder:
Re. the outsize influence of the beaver trade on American civilization:
Re. beaver populations, then and now:
Re. the loss of beaver as an earth-changing event:
Re. the remarkable quality of beaver fur:
Re. an estimate of how much acreage in North America was underwater due to beavers in the pre-colonial era:
Re. three centuries of beaver harvesting and its effect on Native populations:
Re. the importance of beaver to the founding of Canada:
Re. the importance of beaver to the founding of America:
Re. Native American relationship to beaver:
More to come ...
Re. the significant difference between pre- and post- beaver trade habitat:
- "Ignore for a moment the selfish-gene cause, the exploitation of a wild animal for mere fashion. These acts of beaver removal ... abruptly terminated centuries stretching deeply into the past when beavers and their works fashioned the continent's watercourses into ribbons of inundation and trickling water storage. With beavers gone, that wet world -- the kind of wetness many places will long for in the coming climate -- has yielded to flashier runoffs that have cut gullies and arroyos and helped produce a drier North America." p. X (Flores)
" .... beavers create a continent quite different from the one we might hold in our romantic imaginations about 'virgin' (or Indian) America. Beaver America was -- is -- a swampier, boggier, muddier landscape than we might think. The sparkling, free-running mountain streams of modern fly-fisher or river-runner fantasies, much like the predator-free paradise of twentieth-century sport hunting, necessarily give way to a very different world when beavers and wolves are back." p. XI (Flores)
Re. Rocky Mountain beaver exploitation:
- "In the autumn of 1807, John Colter, a former member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, followed the Bighorn River into the Rocky Mountains to trade with the Crow Indians. Colter wandered Wyoming for months in the snow and dead of winter, toting little more than a rifle and a pack. Although no one's quite certain where his route took him, he's considered the first white man to enter the hole, a word trappers used to describe broad, game-filled valleys. He also found lots of beavers." p. 3 (Goldfarb)
"In the decades that followed, a parade of fortune-seekers followed Colter's footsteps into the Northern Rockies, a region that, blared one newspaper, 'posses[ed] a wealth of furs not surpassed by the mines of Peru.' (1) These travelers were the famed mountain men, rapacious beaver trappers who, between the early 1820s and the late 1840s, systematically ransacked just about every pond and stream between Colorado and California. Most of those pelts flowed to the Missouri River and thence to St. Louis, to be shipped off to the East Coast or Europe for conversion into fashionable hats. With breathtaking speed, the mountain men demolished their resource, virtually wiping out beavers throughout the American West. 'The trappers often remarked to each other as they rode over these lonely plains that it was time for the white man to leave the mountains,' Osborne Russell, a beaver hunter who frequented Wyoming and Utah, wrote in 1841, 'as beaver and game had nearly disappeared.' " (2) p. 3,4 (Goldfarb)
Re. how trumpeter swans relied on beaver habitat:
- "Although the reign of the mountain men was brief, they left an enduring ecological legacy. If you know nothing else about beavers, you're probably aware that they build dams: walls of wood, mud, and rock that hold back water and form ponds and wetlands. The rodents also construct lodges, towering houses that often rise from open water like volcanic islands. These structures don't just house beavers themselves. Trumpeter swans squat rent-free atop beaver lodges, commandeering them as nesting platforms upon which their chicks shelter from land-bound predators like foxes. The majestic white birds also crave the elodea, sago pondweed, and other aquatic plants that grow in shallow beaver ponds." p. 4 (Goldfarb)
"By trapping out the Northern Rockies' beavers, the mountain men unwittingly destroyed countless acres of prime swan habitat. A few decades later farmers and ranchers finished the job by draining wetlands to make way for cattle and alfalfa. Today only ninety or so resident trumpeter swans linger in the region, and chicks seldom survive. 'Beaver ponds would've been strung out like necklaces down these drainages, and this landscape would have been a giant sponge,' a swan biologist named Ruth Shea told me. ' That's why there were swans nesting everywhere. Swans are the poster child for the importance of beaver.' " p. 4 (Goldfarb)
My comment:
After some checking, it appears unlikely that trumpeter swans relied on Virginia beaver habitat for breeding as described in the above, which specifically refers to swans in the Northern Rockies. Swans may have wintered in Virginia, but there may not have been swan nests on beaver lodges there. However, other birds and animals would certainly have benefited from beaver habitat, as will be shown further down. [Link to Swan Controversy is no longer active; http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~insrisg/nature/swans.html]
Re. the pre-colonial environment/ecosystem:
- "Instead of envisioning a present-day stream, I want you to reach into the past -- before the mountain men, before the Pilgrims, before Hudson and Champlain and the other horsemen of the furpocalypse, all the way back to the 1500s. I want you to examine the streams that existed before global capitalism purged a continent of its dam-building, water-storing, wetland-creating engineers. I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.
"What do you see this time? No longer is our stream a pellucid, narrow, racing trickle. Instead it's a sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams. Gnawed stumps ring the marsh like punji sticks; dead and dying trees stand aslant in the chest-deep pond. When you step into the water, you feel not rocks underneath but sludge. The musty stink of decomposition wafts into your nostrils. ..." p. 6 (Goldfarb)
Re. biodiversity:
- "In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just 2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity; you may not hear the tinkle of running water in our swamp, but listen closely to the songs of warblers and flycatchers perched in creekside willows. Frogs croak along the pond's marshy aprons; otters chase trout through the submerged branches of downed trees, a forest inverted. The deep water and the close vegetation make the fishing tough, sure, but abundant trout shelter in the meandering side channels and cold depths. In A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean captured the trials and ecstasies of angling in beaver country when he wrote of one character, 'So off he went happily to wade in ooze and to get throttled by brush and to fall through loose piles of sticks called beaver dams and to end up with a wreath of seaweed round his neck and a basket full of fish.' (3) " p. 6, 7 (Goldfarb)
Re. water retention:
- "And it's not just fishermen and wildlife who benefit. The weight of the pond presses water deep into the ground, recharging aquifers for use by downstream farms and ranches. Sediment and pollutants filter out in the slackwaters, cleansing flows. Floods dissipate in the ponds; wildfires hiss out in wet meadows. Wetlands capture and store spring rain and snowmelt, releasing water in delayed pulses that sustain crops through the dry summer. A report by a consulting firm in 2011 estimated that restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah's Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year. (4)" p. 7 (Goldfarb)
Re. the unseen benefits of beaver-caused chaos and disorder:
- "We humans are fanatical, orderly micromanagers of the natural world: We like our crops planted in parallel furrows, our dams poured with smooth concrete, our rivers straitjacketed and obedient. Beavers, meanwhile, create apparent chaos: jumbles of downed trees, riotous streamside vegetation, creeks that jump their banks with abandon. What looks to us like disorder, though, is more properly described as complexity, a profusion of life-supporting habitats that benefit nearly everything that crawls, walks, flies, and swims in North America and Europe. 'A beaver pond is more than a body of water supporting the needs of a group of beavers,' wrote James B. Trefethen in 1975, 'but the epicenter of a whole dynamic ecosystem.' " (11) p. 8 (Goldfarb)
Re. the outsize influence of the beaver trade on American civilization:
- "The fur trade sustained the Pilgrims, dragged Lewis and Clark up the Missouri, and exposed tens of thousands of native people to smallpox. The saga of beavers isn't just the tale of a charismatic animal -- it's the story of modern civilization, in all its grandeur and folly." p. 8, 9 (Goldfarb)
Re. beaver populations, then and now:
- "When Europeans arrived in North America, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton guessed that anywhere from sixty million to four hundred million beavers swam its rivers and ponds. (11) p. 9 (Goldfarb)
".... trappers reduced their numbers to around one hundred thousand by the turn of the twentieth century." p. 9 (Goldfarb
"Somewhere around fifteen million survive in North America [now], though no one knows the number for certain.* p. 9 (Goldfarb)
Re. the loss of beaver as an earth-changing event:
- "Europeans began despoiling North American ecosystems the moment they set boots on the stony shore of the New World. You're probably familiar with most of the colonists' original environmental sins: They wielded an ax against every tree, lowered a net to catch every fish, turned livestock onto every pasture, churned the prairie to dust. In California's Sierra Nevada, nineteenth-century gold miners displaced so much sediment that the sludge could have filled the Panama Canal eight times. (14) We are not accustomed to discussing the fur trade in the same breath as those earth-changing industries, but perhaps we should. The disappearance of beavers dried up wetlands and meadows, hastened erosion, altered the course of countless streams, and imperiled water-loving fish, fowl, and amphibians -- an aquatic Dust Bowl. Centuries before the Glen Canyon Dam plugged up the Colorado and Cuyahoga burst into flame, fur trappers were razing stream ecosystems. The systematic extirpation of beavers, wrote Suzanne Fouty in 2008, represented 'the first large-scale Euro-American alteration of watersheds.' " (15) p. 9, 10 (Goldfarb)
Re. the remarkable quality of beaver fur:
- "Nearly as remarkable as beavers' teeth is their fur, the material so soft and pliable that it spurred the colonization of a continent. ... Altogether, a stamp-sized patch of beaver skin is carpeted with up to 126,000 individual hairs--more than the average human has on her entire head. While the stiff guard hairs are plucked and discarded by hatmakers, the underfur is one of the finest materials in which humans have ever clothed themselves. In his poem 'The Triumph,' Ben Johnson analogized feminine beauty to swan's down, lilies, fresh snow, and the 'wool of beaver.' p. 27 (Goldfarb)
Re. an estimate of how much acreage in North America was underwater due to beavers in the pre-colonial era:
- "Although North America may never again host its full beaver complement, we can still envisage the soggy world that once prevailed. In 2005 David Butler and George Malanson, geographers at Texas State University and the University of Iowa, respectively, calculated that somewhere between 15 and 250 million beaver ponds puddled North America before European arrival. (38). Given the continent's diverse topography, there's really no such things as a 'typical' beaver pond: Researchers in Montana's Glacier National Park surveyed ponds whose area averaged a skimpy tenth of an acre, while others in eastern North Carolina found that average ponds measured a robust four and a half acres. For argument's sake, though, let's split the difference and estimate that the continent was laced with 150 million ponds that averaged a single acre apiece. If that's true, beavers once submerged 234,000 square miles of North America -- an area larger than Nevada and Arizona put together.
"Thanks to beavers, ours was a watery country, a matrix of ponds and swamps, marshes and wetlands, damp mountain meadows and tangled bottomlands. But the same luscious fur that made beavers so well adapted for their aquatic world would soon prove their downfall -- and the undoing of the ecosystems they helped create." p. 36 (Goldfarb)
Re. three centuries of beaver harvesting and its effect on Native populations:
- "... the mountain men [of the 1800s] were late entrants to the beaver business. Since the 1500s, trappers and traders had been harvesting North America's beavers for coats, capes, and most of all, hats. ... The drive for pelts paved the way for towns and farms to plow under the very wilderness in which the mountain men made their bones. The industry also decimated indigenous communities, acting as the vanguard -- sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deliberately -- for remorseless politicians, military leaders, and businessmen who yearned to seize the West for whites." p. 40 (Goldfarb)
Re. the importance of beaver to the founding of Canada:
- ""Canada,' Margaret Atwood wrote, 'was built on dead beavers."" (7) p. 40 (Goldfarb)
Re. the importance of beaver to the founding of America:
- "Although Americans don't pay similar heed to our beaver heritage, Atwood could have penned the same line about the United States. Beaver furs were the wind in the sails of the Mayflower, furnishing Pilgrims with a tradable good with which to repay their creditors back in England. 'The Bible and the beaver were the two mainstays of the young colony,' James Truslow Adams wrote. 'The former saved its morale, and the latter paid its bills, and the rodent's share was a large one.' (8)" p. 40, 41 (Goldfarb).
Re. Native American relationship to beaver:
- "Needless to say, white settlers were millennia short of being the first North Americans to depend on beaver. For thousands of years, the continent's native peoples had eaten the rodents' flesh and fatty tails, draped themselves in furs, and used castoreum as medicine; in 1609, for instance, the French author Marc Lescarbor observed members of Nova Scotia's Mi'kmaq placing slices of 'beaver stone' atop wounds. (10) The Naskapi burned beaver scapulae and searched cracks in the scorched bones for portents; British Columbia's Clayoquot employed beaver molars as dice in gambling games, and numerous tribes and First Nations used beaver mandibles and incisors as chisels, scrapers, and knives. One Cree creation story centers around Great Beaver, whose titanic dam flooded the entire world, compelling Wisagatcak the trickster to bundle other animals onto a raft and replant the planet with moss.' (11) p. 41 (Goldfarb)
More to come ...
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Massive quantities of beaver parts still being harvested today
Beaver being over-harvested is a problem to this day. Check out this horrifying article re. the smuggling of beaver parts for the Chinese traditional medicine trade. "Chinese authorities seize 12 tons of beaver penises smuggled from Canada - Jan. 9, 2020" Link from Naijatell |
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How beavers became North America's best firefighter
The rodent creates fireproof refuges for many species, suggesting wildlife managers should protect beaver habitat as the U.S. West burns. - National Geographic article Link Ben Goldfarb, Sept. 22, 2020
[This is just my speculation, but wet beaver habitat may have made it possible for east coast Indians to practice their slash and burn practices without decimating whole forests.]
The rodent creates fireproof refuges for many species, suggesting wildlife managers should protect beaver habitat as the U.S. West burns. - National Geographic article Link Ben Goldfarb, Sept. 22, 2020
[This is just my speculation, but wet beaver habitat may have made it possible for east coast Indians to practice their slash and burn practices without decimating whole forests.]
Some beaver and beaver hat links
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-the-fur-trade-1670-to-1870/
http://costumehistorian.blogspot.com/2015/09/hats-felts-demi-castors-castors-and.html
https://daily.jstor.org/beavers-hats-fur-trade/
http://www.alfredjacobmiller.com/explore/from-pelt-to-felt/
http://furfortfunfacts.blogspot.com/2012/12/how-much-did-beaver-hat-cost.html
https://oloverhats.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/the-beaver-hat-then-now/
https://www.warpaths2peacepipes.com/the-indian-wars/beaver-wars.htm
http://emuseumplus.lsh.se/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=42735&viewType=detailView
https://people.com/pets/beavers-could-help-protect-rivers-from-climate-change-study/
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-the-fur-trade-1670-to-1870/
http://costumehistorian.blogspot.com/2015/09/hats-felts-demi-castors-castors-and.html
https://daily.jstor.org/beavers-hats-fur-trade/
http://www.alfredjacobmiller.com/explore/from-pelt-to-felt/
http://furfortfunfacts.blogspot.com/2012/12/how-much-did-beaver-hat-cost.html
https://oloverhats.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/the-beaver-hat-then-now/
https://www.warpaths2peacepipes.com/the-indian-wars/beaver-wars.htm
http://emuseumplus.lsh.se/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=42735&viewType=detailView
https://people.com/pets/beavers-could-help-protect-rivers-from-climate-change-study/
Updated June 15, 2024 / Banner photo by Hadley-Ives
