Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and the European Fur Trade

Chapter 4: The Decline of Beaver Populations

Chapter 4 The Decline of Beaver Populations The country about Hudson’s Bay abounds with animals of several kinds. I shall begin with the Beaver. . . . A full grown beaver will weigh twenty-four pounds, is two feet long to two and a half from the nose to the rump, and the tail twelve inches long and six broad, has eight teeth in each jaw, six of which masticate their food. The other two (which are placed in the front and are half an inch long in the lower and three quarters in the upper jaw) sever to cut their trees and sever their food, which consists of the rind of willow and poplar, but they eat nothing of a resinous kind. —Andrew Graham, governor of York Factory, circa 1767 N ative Americans paid for kettles, guns, blankets, alcohol, tobacco, cloth, and other European goods with furs, mainly beaver pelts. In Chapter 3 we saw that as the price of furs at the posts rose, native consumers purchased more goods, notably luxury items. What we explore here is the extent to which the increased trade was reflected in the number of beaver pelts delivered to the posts, and how that in turn affected the beaver population. This is an important question because the Hudson Bay Company’s long-term profitability as well as the viability of the trade for native peoples depended on the beaver resource. Beaver were a renewable resource that potentially could support a trade indefinitely, but the beaver could also be overhunted. Here we try to determine what happened The Decline of Beaver Populations 107 to the stock of beaver in the Hudson’s Bay Company hinterlands in response to the increasing trade. By 1700 the population of European beaver, Castor fiber, had been driven to virtual extinction, and the beaver populations in the eastern parts of the North American continent had also been affected by overharvesting. At the opening of European trade around Hudson Bay, beaver were plentiful in a wide area that stretched from the bay to the Rocky Mountains, just as Pierre Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, had predicted. Over the six decades examined here, spanning 1700 to 1763, native traders sold a total of 2.75 million beaver pelts to the Hudson’s Bay Company. Nearly 1 million were traded at Fort Albany, 1.3 million were traded at York Factory, and just under a half million were traded at Fort Churchill.1 In addition, nearly as many beaver pelts were sold to the French, although our figures for the French trade are much less precise. There is evidence that by 1821, beaver in the Hudson Bay drainage basin had been seriously overhunted, but we know little about the pattern, timing, and magnitude of the decline.2 By exploring the time path of beaver populations in each of three Hudson’s Bay hinterlands in the first six decades of the eighteenth century, we hope to shed light not only on the issue of depletion but also on the question of native labor supply to commercial activities, which we explore further in Chapters 5 and 6. There is, of course, little direct information on the number of beaver that inhabited the Hudson Bay region in the eighteenth century, but a variety of indirect sources can be brought to bear on the question. We know the number of furs traded to the Hudson’s Bay Company from the post records, and for a few years we have estimates of the number of beaver traded to the French. There is also a large contemporary body of research on the ecology of the beaver. Researchers have documented beaver family structure and fertility and mortality rates in the presence and absence of hunting, along with the resulting patterns of population change.3 In addition , there are estimates of beaver densities in the region of Hudson Bay drawn from aerial surveys and returns from trap lines.4 By combining these diverse sources we develop a picture of what was happening to the population of beaver in each of the three major hinterlands of the Hudson’s Bay Company: Fort Albany, York Factory, and Fort Churchill. Although our estimates are speculative in the sense that we do not have actual beaver 108 Chapter 4 counts, they still reveal much about how the fur trade was practiced by Native Americans and Europeans. Castor...