tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69243652727399583592024-03-13T05:13:49.211-07:00My Skin Your SkinHow Beavers Survived the Fur TradeBob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-40253144822027371052013-07-23T12:27:00.002-07:002014-10-10T18:33:29.867-07:00Beavers at the Lachine Rapids<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9qXINKpX8jc/UecZrWVSWOI/AAAAAAAAs8U/R6sPdz_7QQM/s1600/Larapidsa18may13.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9qXINKpX8jc/UecZrWVSWOI/AAAAAAAAs8U/R6sPdz_7QQM/s400/Larapidsa18may13.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The man who controlled the west end of the Island of Montreal should have become the richest man in New France. The rapids there challenged the canoes and boats bringing furs down the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers so selling them just before the rapids was prudent. However, the man who bought that end of the island, La Salle, thought of it as a base for further exploration for the glory of France. He had no head for business and in effect mortgaged his sweet set up to finance his discoveries. But why did he need a head for business when from his talks with Indians he knew just the river to take west (what became the Ohio) to reach the Pacific Ocean and consequently easy passage through North America to the riches of China?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Some of the men he recruited for his explorations decided playing the middle man in the fur trade was easier than going down the Ohio and Mississippi, and LaSalle let them return to the west end of the Island of Montreal. Wags in Montreal called the returnees Les Chinois, the Chinese, and their settlement was called Lachine (pronounced La-Shin) and the nearby rapids were called the Lachine Rapids. The importance of Lachine in the fur trade is memorialized by the Lachine Fur Trade Museum in an old stone warehouse along the canal eventually built to get around the rapids.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk6S4epjWI/AAAAAAAAWec/k57vdx9gXkw/s1600/warehouse.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk6S4epjWI/AAAAAAAAWec/k57vdx9gXkw/s400/warehouse.jpg" height="480" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551032111783841122" style="display: block; height: 300px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" width="640" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Last time I visited in 2010 it was a goofy little museum geared to 5th graders, <a href="http://bobarnebeckfur.blogspot.com/2010/12/lachine-fur-trade-museum.html" target="_blank">Lachine Fur Trade Museum</a>, so one can only speculate how many pelts from dead beavers passed through Lachine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">My son who grew up along on Wellesley Island in the middle of the St. Lawrence about 15 miles downstream from its source, Lake Ontario, has been a Ph. D. candidate in engineering in Montreal for almost 4 years and he keeps an eye on the river, principally for fish, but he knows my interest in beavers. He reported that he saw beaver gnawed trees and a huge lodge along the river near the Lachine Rapids.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This May I went to check it out. Hiking along the north shore of the river, I saw the lodge nestled on a low bank of a spit of land in a quiet part of the river.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Dv06IJr1hxk/UecZ5j_3saI/AAAAAAAAs8c/A7CX7krCzW4/s1600/Lalodge18may13.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Dv06IJr1hxk/UecZ5j_3saI/AAAAAAAAs8c/A7CX7krCzW4/s400/Lalodge18may13.JPG" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The rapids are on the other side of the small island in the background of the photo above. You can see the extent of the east end of the small islands in the photo below.</span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-V9Uf9txc7Ws/UecaCiPo2-I/AAAAAAAAs8k/82f_4bP8TDw/s1600/Lalodgea18may13.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-V9Uf9txc7Ws/UecaCiPo2-I/AAAAAAAAs8k/82f_4bP8TDw/s400/Lalodgea18may13.JPG" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Looking downstream, I could see the huge expanse of the St. Lawrence as it flowed down to Montreal. My photo just captured a few tall buildings in the east end of that metropolis.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">A causeway with a few small bridges gives access to the south side of the far island where the rapids roar. At the entrance to the causeway and park, there is a kiosk and on the Saturday I was there, it was manned by a park ranger gesturing over a small pile of animal pelts, bones, antlers and a stuffed bird on a table.</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_znWFfA_cQk/Uecaab_IMLI/AAAAAAAAs80/4JeWYfTP_C8/s1600/Lapelts18may13.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_znWFfA_cQk/Uecaab_IMLI/AAAAAAAAs80/4JeWYfTP_C8/s400/Lapelts18may13.JPG" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The dead beaver was draped near some gnawed logs. My son had been surprised to see evidence that beavers were here and to know that beavers were living so close to the city that had been the headquarters of the fur trade that almost consigned beavers to extinction excited me, but Parks Canada saw the return of beavers to Lachine as an opportunity to once again misconstrue the importance of beavers in Canadian life and history.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The French and British exploration of North America was primarily motivated by the desire to rival the earlier conquests of Spain. The fervent hope was that the northern lands would yield as much gold as Spain stole to the south, or at least find a passage to China. A secondary motivation was religious. The French simply sought souls to convert and sent only good Catholics to do it. The British were more interested in driving Indians off land, and they didn’t have the scruples the French had about letting religious dissidents loose in the “virgin” land. The dissidents created successful colonies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The fur trade was not essential to successful colonization. The 19 century American Francis Parkman made the case that it distracted from it. As Parkman pointed out, Canadians who should have domesticated the land, instead gallivanted across it leading dissolute hope-to-strike-it-rich lives, though no one mistook beaver pelts as the equivalent of gold. Unlike modern historians, Parkman apologized to the beavers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"One cannot repress a feeling of indignation,” Parkman wrote, “at the fate of the interesting and unfortunate animals uselessly sacrificed to a false economic system."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Puritans did send beaver pelts back to England, but the cows they brought from England were more important to them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Historians since Parkman have been so assiduous in assigning economic and cultural importance to the fur trade, which was and remains a rather nasty murdering business, that I think its glorification serves to repress consideration of the religious controversies of the 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries, and the near genocide of North American aboriginals. The fur trade was the key to corrupting them. Yet modern scholars can argue that Indians gained from it and Indians today claim killing beavers as a cherished part of their heritage.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">After a glance at the dead beaver on the kiosk table, I continued along the causeway, and soon could gauge the level of concern about the beavers. Many trees were wrapped around their lower trunk with chicken wire.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There were a half dozen men with fancy cameras walking along the causeway. I don’t think they were angling for photos of beavers. There was a great white egret fishing in the shallows. I took a photo of it too.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There were also humans fishing in a large lagoon on the west side of the causeway. It was easy to see why beavers came to this area. The causeway for the park served as a dam, backing up waters into what was in effect a pond. While many trees were protected with chicken wire, the scrubby willows along all the placid shores of the pond weren’t. Civilization was near. I could see houses from the causeway, but they weren’t too close so that people and vehicles got in the way of the beavers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I kept looking for and not seeing fresh beaver gnawing, but in May beavers embrace the green grass and green leaves that they have been without for months. In May, the river is also brimming with water. This year, 2013, the St. Lawrence was lower than usual but the Ottawa was fully charged so the rumble and roar of the rapids was impressive. Many of the trees along the shore of the rapids were protected with chicken wire.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EzpR_5AxP34/Uem-gvFI-8I/AAAAAAAAs9c/k_ooe8a8-0s/s1600/Latrees18may13.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EzpR_5AxP34/Uem-gvFI-8I/AAAAAAAAs9c/k_ooe8a8-0s/s400/Latrees18may13.JPG" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">But I found an angle that showed where beavers had cut trees just a few feet from the rapids.</span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hwT8EsK-Iow/Uem-rSbtnvI/AAAAAAAAs9k/-I5FGxrApEo/s1600/Larapids18may13.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hwT8EsK-Iow/Uem-rSbtnvI/AAAAAAAAs9k/-I5FGxrApEo/s400/Larapids18may13.JPG" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">On my way back, no one was talking with the ranger in the kiosk so I learned from him that beavers have been here for 10 to 15 years and that they thought there were about 18 of them in three lodges.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">He claimed that no one within 200 miles would have any interest in trapping these beavers. Only the Cree Indians up north were trappers. I have my doubts about that. Up river where I live, trapping is popular in both New York and Ontario. Perhaps in Quebec sportsmen distinguish themselves from Indians by not trapping in the southern part of the province, reserving their energies for the bear hunt up north.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I didn’t argue about Canada’s unfortunate association of the fur trade with its history, and the ubiquitous dead beaver at so many portals to Canadian history. The irony is that while the beaver’s fur, like the fur of most mammals, is quite beautiful, the preservation of the beaver’s fur for clothing and accessories was not what the fur trade was about. The fur was boiled into felt; the felt pressed into hats; the hats sold for high price for men to exhibit their wealth and status; until fashions changed and it’s usually the grubbiest characters in a Dickens’ novel who wear an old beaver hat.</span>Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-44051219554715356722011-03-24T06:07:00.000-07:002011-04-10T18:21:23.119-07:00Audubon and the Beaver That Got Away<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nrxqlHW-F7I/TZo2mKdld1I/AAAAAAAAY1Y/gdk67rvUV9g/s1600/beaverauubon.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nrxqlHW-F7I/TZo2mKdld1I/AAAAAAAAY1Y/gdk67rvUV9g/s400/beaverauubon.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5591841916605265746" /></a><br /><br />In 1843 John James Audubon went up the Missouri River to collect specimens and make notes for his book on North America's four legged mammals. The image above captures his take on beavers, although the beavers depicted weren't collected on his trip up the Missouri. While he did collect the skins of other mammals and made sketches of wolves, bisons and pronghorns, he couldn't trap a beaver, even with the help of a vaunted Mountain Man. It makes a good story, at least from the beaver's point of view.<br /><br />When he went up the river his Portfolio on birds had already made him famous. So he was highly regarded by the traders, trappers, and military officers who were able to ease his way. Fifty-eight years old, his long hair was white, he had a beard, and not quite the energy he once had.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zzcWQTX2EL0/TZo7nc9af0I/AAAAAAAAY1g/7l-3IPuB_bQ/s1600/AudubonJJ1843a.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 309px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zzcWQTX2EL0/TZo7nc9af0I/AAAAAAAAY1g/7l-3IPuB_bQ/s400/AudubonJJ1843a.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5591847436308610882" /></a><br /><br />He was still a good shot, though it's hard to imagine that he wore that fur-trimmed jacket when he was out hunting. Going up the Missouri, he and his associates shot whatever they could, birds as well as mammals. Audubon went up the river a decade or so after the peak of the fur trade in the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. So for much of the trip Audubon could only make notes of where beavers had been, more to show their commercial importance, than to inform an essay on their habits and habitat. For example on May 20 he noted "we have passed today Jacques River, or, as I should call it, La Riviere a Jacques, named after a man who some twenty or more years ago settled on its banks, and made some money collecting Beavers, etc." <br /><br />On June 4, they passed an old Riccaree Indian village where Gen. William Ashley, the famous organizer of trapping expeditions, had lost 18 men in a battle with Indians, who used weapons Ashley traded with them. But, as Ashley had told Audubon, it "proved fortunate for him" because nearby he "procured one hundred packs of Beaver skins for a mere song." (Audubon seemed to delight in relating trades in which the Indians got the worst of the bargain.) That night one of Audubon's men went out to hunt and when he crossed Beaver Creek on a raft, he saw "traces" of otter and beaver.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y03xxiECpBQ/TZvHAHCm9UI/AAAAAAAAY2w/oS5a-9_I1b0/s1600/fort_union_on_the_missouri.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 305px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y03xxiECpBQ/TZvHAHCm9UI/AAAAAAAAY2w/oS5a-9_I1b0/s400/fort_union_on_the_missouri.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5592282167014520130" /></a> <br /><br />On June 12, their river boat reached Fort Union there Audubon learned from a son of the famous trapper Chouteau that beavers were "very scarce" in the mountains, which didn't prevent Audubon from wanting to trap a beaver. In his Journal he worried about the fate of the bison, even as he and his hunters killed many. Audubon gained 25 pounds on the trip. But he didn't express any concern about over-trapping beavers. <br /><br />He didn't especially like trappers. At Fort Union all the trappers on board left and headed for the wilderness. Audubon noted that, "the filth they have left below has been scraped and washed off." There is no evidence in his Journal that he quizzed any of those trappers on the ways of the beaver, nor that he enjoyed their company. But while he didn't think much of trappers as traveling companions, he respected their bravery, and saw nothing wrong with their killing as many beavers as they could.<br /><br />He met one at the Fort who had left on April 1 with three other men. They were made prisoner by 400 Sioux Indians; they kept him a day and a half; he had had no food to speak of for the last 11 days; he was "filthy beyond description and having only one very keen, bright eye which looked as if he were both proud and brave" <br /><br />The trapper he finally talked to about beavers was Etienne Provost. Audubon always called him "Old Provost." He was born in Chambly, Quebec, in 1785,according to notes in the modern edition of Audubon's Missouri Journal. So he was 58, the same age as Audubon, who, by the way, was born in Haiti. Audubon wrote:<br /><br />"Old Provost has been telling me much of interest about Beavers, once so plentiful, but now very scarce. It takes about 70 Beavers skins to make a pack of 100 pounds; in a good market this pack is worth 500 dollars, and in fortunate seasons a trapper sometimes makes the large sum of 4 thousand dollars. Formerly, when Beavers were abundant, companies were sent with as many as 30 and 40 men, each with from 8 to a dozen traps, and two horses. When at a propitious spot, they erected a camp, and every man sought his own game; the skins alone were brought to the camp, where a certain number of men always remained to stretch them dry."<br /><br />Audubon, or his co-author John Bachman, put that passage more or less verbatim in their book on mammals. In that book, Provost is credited with being the authors' principal source of information about beavers, although there his name is spelled "Prevost." He's described as trapper for the American Fur Company for "upwards of twenty years." He was more famous than that and is well remembered in Utah because the city of Provo and Provo River are named after him. There you will find a statue of him.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-B0OdfUfzIF8/TaH4vd2GY9I/AAAAAAAAY3Q/Q2o6g4enCFI/s1600/provost.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 256px; height: 384px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-B0OdfUfzIF8/TaH4vd2GY9I/AAAAAAAAY3Q/Q2o6g4enCFI/s400/provost.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5594025706519946194" /></a><br /><br />One Utah history web site notes that he was "considered by his contemporaries as one of the most knowledgeable, skillful, and successful of the mountain men." Another source gives 1782 as his birth date. <br /><br />What Provost told Audubon about beavers must have been pretty accurate, because Audubon's book gives a creditable account of beavers. (See: http://books.google.com/books?id=6bZCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA357&dq=audubon+viviparous+quadrupeds+beavers&hl=en&ei=f1GiTY-iIIPBhAeemomMBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA ) <br /><br />The book also tells how beavers are trapped and suggests that a trap baited with castoreum, a scented fluid a beaver squirts from a sac at the base of its tail, rarely fails to catch a beaver. "The Beaver can smell the castoreum at least one hundred yards, makes towards it at once, and is generally caught.... Where beavers have not been disturbed or hunted, and are abundant, they nearly half raise out of the water at the first smell of castoreum, and become so excited that they are heard to cry aloud, and breath hard to catch the odor as it floats on the air." The book doesn't note that twice Provost set out to trap a beaver for Audubon, and failed.<br /><br />On July 16 Provost took Audubon's young assistant artist, Isaac Sprague and another hunter "down river to Charbonneau, and there try their luck at Otters and Beavers...." They returned three days later and in his Journal, Audubon quotes from the journal Sprague kept.<br /><br />The three men went down the Yellowstone River to Charbonneau creek, "issuing from a clump of willows" 10 feet wide and "so shallow we were obliged to push our boat over the slippery mud for about 40 feet." They found a "pond" 50 feet wide and 6 or 8 feet deep extending a mile up the crooked fiver lined with willows with prairie beyond. "About a quarter mile from the mouth of the river we discovered what what we were in search of, the Beaver lodge. To measure it was impossible as it was not perfect, in the first place, in the next it was so muddy that we could not get ashore, but as well as I can, I will describe it. The lodge is what is called the summer lodge; it was composed wholly of brush, willow chiefly, with a single hole for the entrance and exit of the beaver. The pile resembled as much as anything I can compare it, a brush heap about 6 feet high, and about 10 or 15 feet base, and standing 7 or 8 feet from the water. There were a few Beaver tracks about which gave us encouragement." <br /><br />They set two traps where they saw the most tracks. "The end of a willow twig is then chewed and dipped in the Medicine Horn which contains the bait; this consists of castoreum mixed with spices; a quantity is collected on the chewed end of the twig, the stick is then placed in or at the edge of water leaving the part with the bait about two inches above the surface and in front of the trap; on edge side the bait and about 6 inches from it, two dried twigs are placed in the ground.... Before we were asleep we heard a Beaver dive, and slap his tail, which sounded like the falling of a round stone in the water; here was encouragement again." <br /><br />But they had no luck and moved the traps, but had no luck the next night either. Provost decided there was only one beaver, a male. The hunters ate buffalo meet, and shot a doe. The water in the river had fallen so much in two days, that they had to strip, get in the mud and push their boat. It's been many years since I've been out west, and I was not interested in beavers then. But a real estate agency has a photo of a beaver dam on the Yellowstone River which gives some idea of where Provost was looking for beavers.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gEqhko26RqI/TZ0chX7xb6I/AAAAAAAAY24/jBh1kEncDF0/s1600/yellowstonebv.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gEqhko26RqI/TZ0chX7xb6I/AAAAAAAAY24/jBh1kEncDF0/s400/yellowstonebv.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5592657671950004130" /></a><br /><br />The three men rejoined Audubon who noted in his Journal that "Provost was discomfited and crestfallen at the failure of the Beaver hunt." It had been show time for the Mountain Man and he came up short. <br /><br />They all continued up the Yellowstone with Audubon relishing more trapper's tales rather than the actual animal. He heard that beavers shot swimming "sink at once to the bottom, but their bodies rise again in from 20 to 30 minutes. Hunters, who frequently shoot and kill them by moonlight, return in the morning from their camping-places, and find them on the margins of the shore where they had shot." He didn't put that un-romantic image of trappers in his essay on the beaver. <br /><br />He did put Provost's description of "Paresseux" beavers, unattached males who refused to work and were expelled by the beavers that do. They often live together in river banks, and are easy to trap. (They sound a bit like the men who trap them.)<br /><br />When the boat reached Beaver Creek, which doesn't look that commodious today, <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Hbv_BTihTAM/TaH4vEbtPxI/AAAAAAAAY3I/rC_y57Wgjrs/s1600/beaver_creek.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Hbv_BTihTAM/TaH4vEbtPxI/AAAAAAAAY3I/rC_y57Wgjrs/s400/beaver_creek.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5594025699698360082" /></a><br /><br />Provost led a group on another Beaver hunt and Audubon went with them. Provost led them to a lodge and opined that "vagrant" beavers were about. A persistent myth about beavers is that otters are their worst enemy and will attack them. Provost showed how that might have taken root. As he set two traps in shallow water, he explained that beavers trapped there wouldn't drown and otters might come and attack them, which hardly describes otter predation of beavers. It describes otters taking a bite out the trappers' profits. But that day, no otters were in sight, and the odor of castoreum filled the air. Audubon closed the day's Journal with a wish: "I hope I may have a large Beaver tomorrow."<br /><br />He didn't. People back in the boat down river saw the beaver swim by them and away. Audubon had to be content with just taking apart the lodge. Three men climbed inside it. Audubon and Provost were too plump to even try that. Audubon "secured some large specimens of the cuttings used to build the lodge and a pocketful of chips." He gave no report on Provost's feelings. The Mountain Man hurried off to hunt an elk. Audubon headed back to St. Louis a few days later.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3wvXG2Vn3bA/TZ8yN52L3EI/AAAAAAAAY3A/LcNVzzueCPc/s1600/beaverchips.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3wvXG2Vn3bA/TZ8yN52L3EI/AAAAAAAAY3A/LcNVzzueCPc/s400/beaverchips.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5593244476665224258" /></a>Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-19769352308544866412011-02-12T16:37:00.000-08:002011-02-13T06:41:11.343-08:00Beaver Restoration in New York<span style="font-style:italic;">In the early 1900s the State of New York began restoring beavers in the Adirondacks, the state's principal wilderness area that fills most of the northeast section of the state. In 1910 the Adirondacks included between 5000 and 6000 square miles of mostly forested mountains, lakes, plateaus, but villages, sawmills and mines as well. By then it had been settled with about 100,000 permanent residence and timber and mineral resources had been tapped for a century. Most of the report just pinpoints where beavers have been seen. I hope to include maps soon so better sense can be made out of the spread of the beavers from 1905 to 1914, but there is a poetry in all the names of lakes and streams, for anyone who likes beavers.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><br />from State of New York<br /><br />Fourth Annual Report of the Conservation Commission 1914<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Return of Beavers to the Adirondacks<br /></div><br />The beaver has been restored to his favorite haunts, the Adirondacks, by means of restocking and effective protection, according to the reports of systematic observations of protectors and others received by the Conservation Commission. These investigations show that there are to-day between 1,500 and 2,000 beaver in the wilds, which the Iroquois Indians called "Koh-sa-ra-ga," "The Beaver-Hunting-Country," and whose ownership was challenged by the Canadian tribe, styled in derision by the Mohawks, the "Adirondacks," the "Tree Eaters."<br /><br />The Adirondacks to-day are again entitled to their old Iroquois name, for they are rapidly becoming the country of the Beaver, although this favorite fur bearing animal is no longer persecuted by the trapper and hunter.<br /><br />The Legislature of 1903 appropriated $500 to begin the restocking of the Adirondacks with beaver and in 1905 three pairs were liberated. One pair were given their liberty on a small stream entering the south branch of Moose river, where another beaver which had escaped from the Woodruff preserve had built a dam. The other four were liberated on the northeast inlet of Big Moose Lake, but moved over into Beaver river, twenty miles ot the northeaast, to being housekeeping. During 1905 Edward H. Litchfield liberated about a dozen beavers in his preserve near Big Tupper Lake, and several of these escaped into adjoining preserves.<br /><br />In 1905 there was reported to the Fish and Game Commission the existence of a "small native colony of beavers, the last of the remnants of the original stock, inhabiting the waters northwest of upper Saranac Lake." That year the Commission placed a "conservation estimate of the beaver in the Adirondacks" at "about forty." (p 252)<br /><br />In 1906 the Legislature appropriated $1,000 for continuing the restocking of the Adirondacks with beaver and the following year seventeen were obtained from Yellowstone Park and distributed. The Commission gave the beaver census that year at 100.<br /><br />In 1904, about the time the State of New York began its work of restoring the beaver to his native habitat, an authority on "American Animals" recorded in his book the sad fact that "the beaver is now nearly extinct in the United States." Much general interest has been displayed in the work of restoration in this State and the Conservation Commission is happy to say that popular co-operation has made the task of protecting Castor canadensis a comparatively easy one .<br /><br />The reports received by the Conservation Commission show that beaver are multiplying rapidly and are taking possession of their ancient heritage in many different sections of the Adirondacks.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Colton District</font>. Protector Smith of Colton reports three colonies in his territory of the Raquette river country.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Cranberry Lake District</font>. Protector Hand of Cranberyy Lake records 1 colony on Grasse river below the reservoir; 1 colony on Cranberry Lake Inlet; 1 colony on Bog river; and "signs in the Town of Webb."<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Croghan District</font>. Protector Andre of Croghan reports 2 colonies at Sunday Lake; 1 at Stillwater, Beaver river; 1 at Francis Lake; 1 at upper end of Watertown Light and Power dam; 2 on west branch of Oswegatchie river. All "good sized colonies with large houses." Also a few beaver scattered in various places, without permanent habitat as yet.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Forestport District</font>. Protector Bellinger of Forestport reports 3 colonies on the Black river; 1 at Kayuta pond; 1 three miles above Enos where they have built a dam; 1 on the Stillwater below North Lake; 1 colony on north branch of North Lake; 1 colony on second Stillwater above Honondaga Lake on West Canada Creek; several colonies on Indian river. Also reported by protector Ball, 1 colony on Wintime pond; 1 on Little Black Creek; 2 on Twin Lakes streams; 3 on Big Woodhull streams.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Fulton Chain District</font>. Protector Ball of Old Forge enumerates and locates no less than 79 colonies, with 76 dams, inhabited by 223 beaver. The beaver locations in Ball's district are: Old Forge Pond, Big Spring Creek, First Lake and marshes, Second Lake, Third Lake, Fourth Lake, Fifth Lake, Sixth Lake, Seventh Lake, Eighth Lake, Cedar Creek, Black Mt. Creek, Eagle Creek, Limekiln Creek, Red river, Indian river (mostly bank beaver), Nick's Lake, Dry Lake (not dry now, flooded by beaver), Moose river (bank beaver), Hellgate Creek, Indian Spring Creek, Inlet of Big Otter, North Branch above Fulton Chain, Rondax Lake, Snake Pond, Chub Pond, Constable Pond, Queer Lake, south and west branches Beaver river.<br /><br />J. Gilbert Hoffman, of Fulton Chain, finds that the beaver are increasing rapidly in various sections he has visited. He found a colony at Red Horse Chain and others reported by protectors. In that territory the intelligent animals have apparently lost most of their natural fear of man. A beaver dam on Eagle Creek which caused the flooding of the highway, was torn down under the direction of Protector Ball. The beaver reconstructed the dam over night. In another interesting case, the beaver insisted on invading Dr. Nicholl's property on First Lake. Protector Ball placed a lighted lantern in a lodge of the intruders, but they refused to take the hint to move on and, industriously extended their lodge over and around the warning beacon. Then in order to circumvent the trespassing beaver, the men put up a wire fence so the beaver could not get into Nicholl's yard where they were cutting poplars for food. Thereupon the wily animals vindicated the assertion of a scientist who said that "beaver apparently (sic) depend more upon reason and less upon instinct than do the majority of the forest folk." They piled wood against the fence and easily climed (sic) over into the forbidden territory.<br /><br />Mr. Hoffman says the Brown's Tract Lumber Company is glad to see the beaver restored to the Adirondacks. In his opinion they do no great damage except in rare cases where they become so tame as to invade summer camp groves.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Glenfield District</font>. Protector VerSnyder of Glenfield reports the beaver numerous in his section: 1 colony at Mud Hole Pond; 1 at Little Pine Lake; 1 on Pine Creek; 1 on Crawford's Fish Pond. Protector Quirk of Pulaski reports that he has not learned of any beaver in Oswego County. He has information of 1 colony on Crooked Creek, Lewis County, one mile from the south end of Stoney Lake, and 1 colony east of the north end of Stoney Lake in Independence river.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Gloversville District</font>. Protector Masten reports that "the beaver made several visits to Fulton County," but founded no permanent colonies. It is possible that the few beaver in that section are "bank dwellers," as the animals, when disturbed by or not yet accustomed to civilization, do not build lodges.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Keene District</font>. Protector Seckington, Elizabethtown, reports in September a beaver colony at Hull's Falls, town of Keene. On December 10 he reported discovering a new colony which has constructed a dam about 75 feet long, and flooding about 25 acres, on Gates Brook. The animals have built a lodge 15 feet in diameter accommodating 10 to 12 beaver.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Lake Pleasant District</font>. Protector Howland of Speculator, reports very numerous in his territory: On Miami river, two dams with at least 20 beaver at each, and a third dam building in September on that river; 1 colony on Mill Brook; 2 large dams on Whitney Creek. To support the first dam, the beaver have built a dam half a mile below, backing up the water to it that distance. The first dam floods the stream one mile. One small colony on Mosey Fly stream. One large dam on outlet of Spencer Lake, with back water of two miles, inhabited by at least 200 beaver. Large colony and dam on north branch of Sacandaga river, with 30 to 40 inhabitants. Beaver in September were building a new dam on Samson Lake outlet and colony is established there.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Long Lake District</font>. Protector Butler of Long Lake reports at least 30 beaver in his section. He makes this observation of special interest to the trout anglers: "The people living in this section think the beaver are doing fine and are glad to see them back. They tell me the beaver are a protection to our small streams containing trout, because the beaver builds dams and flood the marshes back of the dams. This makes it hard for the fishermen to fish all the pools and gives the trout a chance to grow."<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Newcomb District</font>. Protector Bissell of Newcomb reports 2 large colonies in the town of North Hudson; 1 colony in the town at Minerva and 4 colonies in the town of Newcomb.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Plattsburgh District</font>. Protectors North and Kirby report from Plattsburgh that they found a "good sized colony" of beaver on Smith's Kiln Brook, town of Saranac, Clinton country. The animals have built a dam 35 feet long, flooding an acre.<br /><br />Protector Riley of Plattsburg learned that the colony which had established itself near the mouth of the Ausable river last spring had moved up near Ausable Forks.<br />Protector Kirby of Brainardsville makes report of a colony on Redford Brook.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">Raquette Lake District</font>. Protector Lynn of Raquette Lake makes a detailed report of numerous colonies in his territory, showing over 250 beaver inhabitants. His record of locations is as follows: In Township 40, colonies on Bowlder Brook; 1 on Beaver Brook; 1 on Otter Brook; 2 on Brown's Tract Inlet; 1 on Brandeth Lake stream; 1 on Marion river. In Township 41, 1 colony on Cascade Lake stream; 1 on Shallow Lake stream; 1 on Cranberry Pond; 1 on Eagle Creek; 2 on Two Sisters Pond. In Township 39, 2 colonies on north branch of Shingle Shanty stream; 1 on East Pond. In Township 36, 1 colony on Big Salmon Lake; 1 on Carey Pond; 1 on Rack Pond stream; 1 on Flat Fish Pond; one on Bottle Pond stream. In Township 35, 1 colony on Loose Pond stream; 2 on North Bay Brook, Forked Lake; 1 on Upper Sargeant Pond. In Township 34, 2 colonies on Utawanta Lake; 1 on Loon Brook. In Township 6, 1 colony on Marion river; 2 on South Inlet; 1 on Bear Brook. In Township 5, 1 colony on Brown's Tract Pond. In Township 3, 2 colonies on Hess Pond; 1 colony on Fifth Lake; 1 colony on Seventh Lake; 2 colonies on Red river. In Township 4, 2 colonies on Falls Pond; 2 colonies on Mitchell Pond; 1 on Summer Creek; 2 on Indian river.<br /><br /><font style="font-style: italic;">St. Regis District</font>. William Bump, a caretaker of the Brooklyn Cooperage Company's tract on the St. Regis river, reports the beaver becoming quite numerous around the Ten Mile. Henry House of the Five Mile Camp, St. Regis river, found several families of beaver on Alder Brook.Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-24521832488674453852010-12-29T06:25:00.000-08:002011-02-28T18:34:11.010-08:00Lachine Fur Trade MuseumI visited the Fur Trade Museum in Lachine, Quebec, at the up river edge of Montreal. The historical core of the exhibit is a mixture of portraits, maps, tables and generous examples of dressed furs and beaver felt hats. There was one mounted beaver, a juvenile with summer fur, just the kind not prized by the fur trade.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TRtFpAX5HdI/AAAAAAAAWz0/SLu0bB-i-jk/s1600/beaverc.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 334px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TRtFpAX5HdI/AAAAAAAAWz0/SLu0bB-i-jk/s400/beaverc.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556111136068804050" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Then there were several large, strangely dressed, plush beavers, with exaggerated white incisors, placed on pedestals or barrels around the displays to serve as "guides" to the exhibit.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk1xlVBD5I/AAAAAAAAWd8/Lr_JLjVLoeA/s1600/beaver.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 386px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk1xlVBD5I/AAAAAAAAWd8/Lr_JLjVLoeA/s400/beaver.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551027141660970898" border="0" /></a><br /><br />There were also exaggerated plush human figures including a French Canadian "habitant" carrying a pack of beaver skins, dressed a bit like that first plush beaver.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk2XrSH0uI/AAAAAAAAWeE/PUlT1ddNkqw/s1600/hab.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk2XrSH0uI/AAAAAAAAWeE/PUlT1ddNkqw/s400/hab.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551027796094472930" border="0" /></a><br /><br />and two merchants fighting over a beaver skin.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk2Xw2rmKI/AAAAAAAAWeM/jKQ2w766Rhk/s1600/tug.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk2Xw2rmKI/AAAAAAAAWeM/jKQ2w766Rhk/s400/tug.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551027797589989538" border="0" /></a><br /><br />A plush beaver nearby, dressed a bit like a merchant, held a placard saying: "Merger or no merger, they are still after my hide!"<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk2YvwVWII/AAAAAAAAWeU/GB6Uf3mYIW4/s1600/beavera.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk2YvwVWII/AAAAAAAAWeU/GB6Uf3mYIW4/s400/beavera.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551027814474799234" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Museums in Quebec have a different style, a flare that is often lacking in American and other Canadian museums, but I thought this went too far and I challenged the attendant, asking him if his museum was "serious." He explained that the museum's prime audience was school children and that the exhibit has not been changed since the mid-80's, implying that back then there was an antic streak in the design of Quebec museum displays.<br /><br />Perhaps that is a sufficient explanation, but I found out later that a scholarly conference on the fur trade was held in the Montreal area 1984 so perhaps the museum's exhibit was one of the collateral activities that sometime accompany conferences. If you think that a "scholarly" conference would be too serious to deign to visit such a museum show, then you have never been to a "scholarly" conference.<br /><br />The conference itself wasn't held in this rather small warehouse which indeed is a faithful renovation of the principal depot for furs coming down the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk6S4epjWI/AAAAAAAAWec/k57vdx9gXkw/s1600/warehouse.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQk6S4epjWI/AAAAAAAAWec/k57vdx9gXkw/s400/warehouse.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551032111783841122" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Usually every Scottish name you bump into in Montreal, like McGill University or the McCord Museum, is associated with the fur trade. But those downtown institutions didn't host the conference. It was held at the Lake Saint Louis Historical Society which is a bit up river from Lachine. A tourist in Montreal proper can get an impression that the city has scant interest in the fur trade even though English speaking North Americans think the fur trade was the sole basis for the establishment and growth of Montreal.<br /><br />That all the great names in the city from the fur trade are of English speakers probably lessens the interest of the modern francophone establishment in Montreal for any celebration of the fur trade. The French names associated with the trade are connected in many other ways to the growth of the city. And as I learned from reading the proceedings of the conference at Lac Saint Louis, the principal historian of the Montreal economy prior to the British takeover in 1763, Louise Dechene, contended in a 1974 book published in Paris, that the fur trade was of marginal importance for the growth of Montreal.<br /><br />For English Canadians the fur trade is the first thread that links their country together from sea to sea. To be sure French Canadians served the English in all their fur trade exploits from sea to sea, but before 1763, the thrust of French colonization was through the Great Lakes and then down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. So why shouldn't Montreal have a bit of plush fun at the expense of the dignity of a trade that made a lot of British merchants in Montreal rich?<br /><br />While the plush figures at the Lachine Museum have fun at the expense of beavers, French Canadians and English merchants, the plush figures of Indians are imbued with as much dignity as plush figures can convey. An Indian man stands with more dead animals in hand, and an Indian woman dresses fur at his feet. The Indians are dressed as if they live in the arctic, even though furs from that region never came through Lachine.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TTmUCJQe0XI/AAAAAAAAXVw/sIbNJD7VOvg/s1600/indians.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TTmUCJQe0XI/AAAAAAAAXVw/sIbNJD7VOvg/s400/indians.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5564641579158655346" border="0" /></a><br /><br />But that's quibbling. Who's to say that in the course of the unprecedented slaughter of millions of animals that there were not domestic scenes like this. But why were the Indians the only plush figures accorded some respect?<br /><br />In his introduction to the published proceedings of the 1984 scholarly fur trade conference held near the museum, the late Bruce Trigger, a highly respected Canadian anthropologist, alluded to a memorable program in which conference participants joined the aboriginals living near Montreal, Mohawks of the Kahnawake reserve along the south shore of the St.Lawrence. Trigger didn't go into detail, but left the impression that the Indians insisted in no uncertain terms that they wanted aboriginal participation in the fur trade addressed respectfully.<br /><br />When I moved to the St. Lawrence River valley in 1994 and began watching beavers, I sought the guidance of the local state wildlife biologists who gave me a recently published study about beavers along the river. It didn't give me much information about beavers but it did provide a long analysis of what "stakeholders" along the river thought about beavers based on opinion surveys of the stakeholders. As I recall, farmers, foresters, transportation officials, homeowners, and hikers were considered to have a stake in the management of beavers. As I've been learning ever since, beavers are not stakeholders in this debate. The fur trade exhibit at Lachine reminded me that there are stakeholders in history.<br /><br />Judging from this display Montreal and Quebec have more or less given up their stake in fur trade history, as have the families of the great Scottish fur merchants. But not the Indians. So there is something to be learned in this visual burlesque of the fur trade. A cursory view of the centuries of the trade suggest that the decline and disappearance of most Indian tribes in North America was tied to their participation in the fur trade, and one would think that Indians, of all people, would want to forget it. Of course, I have no idea if Indians influenced how they are displayed in the museum. More likely an anthropologist sensitive to the feelings of Indians made sure that a big nosed, slack jawed half naked brave was not on display being taunted by a plush beaver wearing a war bonnet. <br /><br />Indeed anthropologists today often earn their advanced degrees doing field work with arctic tribes where the hunting and gathering culture persists. Because of that, I am a bit suspicious of what anthropologists write about the fur trade. The material culture uncovered by anthropologists is germane to any historical discussion, but the analysis of anthropologists has to be evaluated carefully. A mutual dependence has grown between anthropologists and the Indians they study, and they both seek to encapsulate, not an episode in the past, but a way of life, with either scientific or mythological trappings. It's bad news for beavers if their slaughter is considered a timeless part of the identity of any segment of contemporary society, or any stake holder in writing the history of the fur trade.<br /><br />So I benefited from visiting the museum. It reminded me of how important it is that we began to try to write a new history of the fur trade from the beavers' point of view.Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-1745889062698656642010-11-15T05:27:00.000-08:002011-02-11T13:49:00.605-08:00Indian Mounds and Beavers<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQBBwodOU1I/AAAAAAAAWbg/mXZ0kpsL0dg/s1600/traceb.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQBBwodOU1I/AAAAAAAAWbg/mXZ0kpsL0dg/s400/traceb.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548507044669969234" /></a><br /><br />I've just completed an inspection of the major southeastern Indian mounds and took another look at the Newark, Ohio, earthworks supplementing a tour I took of the Ohio Indian mounds two years ago. These mounds were all built before contact with Europeans and when I looked at them I tried to sense any influence beavers might have had in inspiring and informing their construction. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxdDj8ISOI/AAAAAAAAWXw/dY6z4qxCNB8/s1600/IMG_5602.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxdDj8ISOI/AAAAAAAAWXw/dY6z4qxCNB8/s400/IMG_5602.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547411156782041314" /></a><br /><br />I want to figure out, as best I can, what relationship beavers had with North Americans before the influx of Europeans and the fur trade between North America and Europe. My working hypothesis is that beavers were unimportant to Indians before the fur trade, as befits an interesting but uncharismatic small mammal.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2z1bW7rII/AAAAAAAAWaw/B41mfhgSutQ/s1600/dpbv7aug9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 269px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2z1bW7rII/AAAAAAAAWaw/B41mfhgSutQ/s400/dpbv7aug9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547788046448700546" /></a><br /><br />Of course, I was only able to approach these sights as a tourist with map and on-site brochures in hand, followed by a tour of attendant museums when possible. After I saw the Newark earthworks, I bought the catalog of the recent Field Museum show on pre-contact Indian art, Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand. Although all these mounds were probably central to the ceremonies of those who built them, there are few tourist sites less ceremonial than these. Cut green grass covers all, and there is no statuary or stonework, no piles of bare dirt, which was the principal building material for the mounds. One can climb the mounds but trees usually obscure the view. I imagine that the Indians who built them and lived with them when they had meaning would be thoroughly dispirited at seeing them today. They remain interesting but not magical, and bleed none of the sweat that must have gone into the building them.<br /><br />Yet I when I first walked around the earthworks in Newark, Ohio, I was thoroughly entranced, though not with the spirit of the ancient Indians. I was entranced with the spirit of beavers! For the past 16 years, I've watched the slow evolution of beaver ponds, lodges, dams, canals. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQDdSJykPEI/AAAAAAAAWcQ/tNLqkm2fSPc/s1600/upspdam2may6.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 287px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQDdSJykPEI/AAAAAAAAWcQ/tNLqkm2fSPc/s400/upspdam2may6.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548678044855843906" /></a><br /><br />What I saw at Newark was a perfectly circular embankment save for a wide opening facing toward the river that ran through the middle of the town a half mile away.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPhoObGdjLI/AAAAAAAAWW4/KJfy8wlP27E/s1600/newark.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPhoObGdjLI/AAAAAAAAWW4/KJfy8wlP27E/s400/newark.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5546297538109082802" /></a><br /><br />In the center of the embankment were two small rounded mounds that presented the same silhouette as a beaver lodge but nothing more, no logs, rocks, mud, the materials beavers use to make their lodges. So I suppose what gave me a sense of the spirit of beavers was the proportions, the empondment of space, to coin a word, with a central focus.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPhoOT36sZI/AAAAAAAAWXA/Y5Xu9rSoOsM/s1600/newarka.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPhoOT36sZI/AAAAAAAAWXA/Y5Xu9rSoOsM/s400/newarka.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5546297536169030034" /></a><br /><br />The proportions were not perfect. The central mounds were dwarfed by the embankment and beaver lodges generally dominate the flats created by beavers with their dams and canals.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP462mYBR4I/AAAAAAAAWa4/CEdzKWKFFJg/s1600/pond.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 252px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP462mYBR4I/AAAAAAAAWa4/CEdzKWKFFJg/s400/pond.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547936500655671170" /></a> <br /><br />The next mounds I visited at Chillicothe, Ohio, requited my yearning for a dominating central focus. The central mound dwarfed the surrounding embankment.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPhpvyDvAvI/AAAAAAAAWXQ/Cz6ihhOO_s0/s1600/hopewell.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPhpvyDvAvI/AAAAAAAAWXQ/Cz6ihhOO_s0/s400/hopewell.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5546299210718970610" /></a><br /><br />I saw two other mound complexes on that first trip, a very large isolated mound, and earthworks shaped like a serpent placed up on a high hill looking down at a river, not on a flat like that other mounds. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPhpvySn4lI/AAAAAAAAWXI/u4ICiuufj40/s1600/800px-Serpent_mound_8438.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPhpvySn4lI/AAAAAAAAWXI/u4ICiuufj40/s400/800px-Serpent_mound_8438.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5546299210781418066" /></a><br /><br />I didn't take the two photos above. It was raining the day I visited.<br /><br />There is a museum at the Chillicothe site dedicated to the Hopewell Indians who made the mounds and their art and artifacts. There was a three inch long stone pipe shaped like a beaver,<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQBBwT6Qu7I/AAAAAAAAWbY/X7tgj_TTL-w/s1600/bvpipe.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 235px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQBBwT6Qu7I/AAAAAAAAWbY/X7tgj_TTL-w/s400/bvpipe.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548507039154617266" /></a><br /><br />and that was the only evidence that the Indians had any non-utilitarian interest in the animal that inspired my enchantment with the mounds. All Indian cultures seemed to use the beaver's giant incisors as a cutting tool.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP5cVGtF9SI/AAAAAAAAWbI/v7VgTY-kgq0/s1600/skull.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP5cVGtF9SI/AAAAAAAAWbI/v7VgTY-kgq0/s400/skull.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547973308613784866" /></a><br /><br />The didactic displays at the museum made clear that the mound-making culture flourished because growing corn fostered a large sedentary population. Here were farmers who were not dependent on animals for food, nor was there evidence that they needed them for clothing, though, to be sure, deer antlers and hides as well as bear claws and robes fascinated them.<br /><br />It seems to me that it does not necessarily follow that if the beaver inspired the Hopewell Indians to build mounds that they would then deify beavers or exalt them in their art and artifacts. Unlike bears, serpents and large birds of prey, beavers are not terrifying. They change the landscape but not by any magical means; nothing is plainer than how they go about their business. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP5cwLSAFhI/AAAAAAAAWbQ/VmOwv6lykJ8/s1600/bvdrag15.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 313px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP5cwLSAFhI/AAAAAAAAWbQ/VmOwv6lykJ8/s400/bvdrag15.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547973773698799122" /></a><br /><br />One doesn't need a high priest to explain the beavers' ways to man. However, there is another problem with my thesis. Where there was a mound building culture, in the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, there were beavers, but farther to the north around the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River valley, where I live, beavers dominated the landscape far more and there the Indians were not great mound builders. Farther to the north, there was less dependence on corn, and, since it is more a land of lakes, less inundation by flooding rivers. <br /><br />One can't visit the mounds without getting a sense that one convenience of having them was as a place of refuge during a flood. A friend lived in a dorm near one in Marietta, Ohio, and when there was a flood inundating parts of the campus, the 40 foot high Indian mound remained high and dry. Perhaps not enough room for a crowd but room enough to keep a king or his buried bones dry. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP5A7y2appI/AAAAAAAAWbA/UJOpu-YkKCM/s1600/marietta.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP5A7y2appI/AAAAAAAAWbA/UJOpu-YkKCM/s400/marietta.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547943186973501074" /></a><br /><br />Beavers provide an on-going demonstration of how to find a dry berth as they managed their controlled floods that let them expand their foraging of trees for the bark food and building materials.<br /><br />More problematical to my beaver-sense of the mounds, was the obvious ceremonial importance of them, especially when I read about the mounds farther south in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The art I saw associated with the Hopewell Indians reminded me of Aztec and Mayan art. How could beavers compete with the advanced civilizations radiating up from the cradle of corn culture in Mexico whose large stone ceremonial structures dominating their plazas still remain?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQBEbr89rlI/AAAAAAAAWcA/bhxm3zzCa18/s1600/aztec.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQBEbr89rlI/AAAAAAAAWcA/bhxm3zzCa18/s400/aztec.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548509983366032978" /></a><br /><br />In early November we got an invitation to spend some time in Birmingham, Alabama, and I know that modern city was not far from three ancient ones. Of course, the only remnants of those cites were the mounds. At first blush I thought there might be some good mounds in Eastern Tennessee that we could see on our way, but the dams built on the Tennessee River flooded several of them. On our way to the Etowah Mounds in northwestern Georgia my wife insisted that we look at the New Echota Cherokee Capital State Historic Site nearby. There we saw a recreation of the Cherokee capital on the eve of that tribes expulsion in 1830s. There were no mounds between the few rude buildings made of wooden planks but there was a short nature trail which I walked on a damp cool morning and I saw beaver work in some small ponds.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPzq_zPHG4I/AAAAAAAAWYw/K705R4lW5uY/s1600/etowah.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPzq_zPHG4I/AAAAAAAAWYw/K705R4lW5uY/s400/etowah.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547567222819855234" /></a><br /><br />A sign explained that New Echota was one of the lowest points in that neck of Georgia and that just a few months before the whole area had been flooded. Indeed, a visitor to the Cherokee capital in the 1830s reported a flood and that residents went from building to building in boats. <br /><br />This prologue to my seeing the Etowah Mounds probably disposed me to sense beavers once again as I crossed a bridge over a deep moat and approached the tall mounds.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxei7IvLuI/AAAAAAAAWX4/PRJIxMODKx0/s1600/etowaha.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxei7IvLuI/AAAAAAAAWX4/PRJIxMODKx0/s400/etowaha.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547412795096510178" /></a><br /><br />We reached the mounds just as a field trip of elementary school kids were leaving it. That brought home the massive scale of these mounds <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxejfrzrCI/AAAAAAAAWYA/LrdO8gD6V_E/s1600/etowahb.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxejfrzrCI/AAAAAAAAWYA/LrdO8gD6V_E/s400/etowahb.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547412804907281442" /></a><br /><br />and even though there was a sizable river flowing not far from the two smaller mounds, the mounds were high enough and square enough not to remind me of beaver lodges. There was a good small museum with many of the artifacts found in the mounds, no stone beavers. There were statues that once again reminded me of Mexican art.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxfmgk-SVI/AAAAAAAAWYI/jPwwwAXxT58/s1600/etowahf.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxfmgk-SVI/AAAAAAAAWYI/jPwwwAXxT58/s400/etowahf.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547413956198287698" /></a><br /><br />A few days later we took a day trip from Birmingham to the Moundville a few miles south of Tuscaloosa and there we saw mounds not quite as high as the principal one at Etowah but there were more of them. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQDmIe5Vm6I/AAAAAAAAWcs/JnhaSVc4USY/s1600/moundvillex.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQDmIe5Vm6I/AAAAAAAAWcs/JnhaSVc4USY/s400/moundvillex.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548687774327348130" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQDhVUkQ4gI/AAAAAAAAWck/lNui9VEPZqM/s1600/bench.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 181px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQDhVUkQ4gI/AAAAAAAAWck/lNui9VEPZqM/s400/bench.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548682497334764034" /></a><br /><br />Atop the highest mound looking at several smaller mounds, I had to rather stretch my imagination to see any analogue to the beaver ponds I tour back on a large island in the St. Lawrence River: a beaver lodge sharing a pond with several smaller muskrat lodges? <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQTiWXsQvsI/AAAAAAAAWc0/N_tK_GqBkdM/s1600/lodgesa.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 302px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQTiWXsQvsI/AAAAAAAAWc0/N_tK_GqBkdM/s400/lodgesa.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5549809514771955394" /></a><br /><br />It was easy to see the point the archaeologists studying this area are making: this was a religious center for a mighty chiefdom to which thousands of people paid homage. Then it became a necropolis. <br /><br />I was about to put aside my nonsense about beavers influencing mound building, when I saw a plaque describing a structure the archaeologists think was built on large rectangular mound no more than three feet high that stretched out beside the tallest moundt. They found evidence of a large lodge built around wooden posts with a rounded shape, <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxhLMhOe3I/AAAAAAAAWYY/CL4qIT3L8Q4/s1600/moundvillec.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 305px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxhLMhOe3I/AAAAAAAAWYY/CL4qIT3L8Q4/s400/moundvillec.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547415685980650354" /></a><br /><br />which, of course, reminded me a beaver lodge.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2w61sy9dI/AAAAAAAAWag/biJQ1U9jE5A/s1600/lpldg16oct10.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2w61sy9dI/AAAAAAAAWag/biJQ1U9jE5A/s400/lpldg16oct10.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547784840884188626" /></a><br /><br />However, these mounds are situated in a loop of the Black Warrior River which seemed to have cut a pretty good canyon suggesting that the area was not that prone to flooding.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2t1LS9XuI/AAAAAAAAWaQ/SuhVLiRo5tU/s1600/bwriver.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2t1LS9XuI/AAAAAAAAWaQ/SuhVLiRo5tU/s400/bwriver.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547781445067300578" /></a><br /><br />Beavers here would have bank lodges fashioned with logs shielding burrows into the river bank.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2yB5wbRlI/AAAAAAAAWao/4feI3dnAdVg/s1600/piclodge27.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2yB5wbRlI/AAAAAAAAWao/4feI3dnAdVg/s400/piclodge27.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547786061743867474" /></a><br /><br />The museum at the site was very good with some prime examples of Mississippian Indian art. Those pieces were bit off to the side and the center of museum catered to the imagination of younger visitors with dioramas of Indian ceremonies. Although none of the archaeological notes I read mentioned costumes of fur, the dioramas made lush use of them. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxhLcGVugI/AAAAAAAAWYg/VibxsfcPEfk/s1600/moundvillee.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxhLcGVugI/AAAAAAAAWYg/VibxsfcPEfk/s400/moundvillee.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547415690162846210" /></a><br /><br />Fortunately, the mannikin Indians were in climate controlled cases and didn't have to sweat the heat of central Alabama burdened with furs. I saw a bear, raccoons, bobcats, various mustelids along with deer hides, but no beaver fur. Then that beaver chord of mine was touched again.<br /><br />One of the major motifs of Mississippian and Hopewell art in general and Moundville art especially is the open hand motif. Archaeologist think it is based on pattern of stars in the constellation we call Orion which signified the earthly portal that was the entrance to the underworld. It struck me that an open hand is shaped a bit like a beaver's paddle tail. Then on one vase I noticed that there was cross hatching on the arm of a hand, not unlike the cross hatching on a beavers tail. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxhLZ7HhbI/AAAAAAAAWYo/FdF81xeo-Yc/s1600/moundvillef.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPxhLZ7HhbI/AAAAAAAAWYo/FdF81xeo-Yc/s400/moundvillef.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547415689578907058" /></a><br /><br />That said I could also see that there was liberal crosshatching on representations of reptiles and birds, symbols explicitly used by these people. I probably had no business thinking of beavers as having anything to do with it. <br /><br />At the Moundville visitors center a short film noted that no Mexican artifacts or trade goods had been found in the mound complex. I reserved my intuitive judgment on that until I got to the Emerald Mounds a few hundred miles closer to Mexico not far from the Mississippi River. I had expected to see the mounds on the same bluff overlooking the river that some of mansions of Natchez, Mississippi, are built, <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2t1MaE0MI/AAAAAAAAWaY/ZpoQoDm8EOM/s1600/miss.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2t1MaE0MI/AAAAAAAAWaY/ZpoQoDm8EOM/s400/miss.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547781445365584066" /></a><br /><br />but instead I found them several miles east just off a winding road through some gentle hills. Emerald Mound doesn't look like a beaver lodge at all. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPzzElb7GCI/AAAAAAAAWY4/f81Zobo4ILc/s1600/emerald.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPzzElb7GCI/AAAAAAAAWY4/f81Zobo4ILc/s400/emerald.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547576101107865634" /></a><br /><br />It is more like a football field elevated some 60 feet with two pyramidal mounds for end zones one larger than the other.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPzzE5m-5PI/AAAAAAAAWZA/VPDnp2L6-gc/s1600/emeralda.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPzzE5m-5PI/AAAAAAAAWZA/VPDnp2L6-gc/s400/emeralda.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547576106522961138" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPzzFOAcmMI/AAAAAAAAWZI/j1-5ql98-1g/s1600/emeraldb.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPzzFOAcmMI/AAAAAAAAWZI/j1-5ql98-1g/s400/emeraldb.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547576111998474434" /></a><br /><br />I had no sense of beavers here. Thanks to the woods around the mounds I couldn't even tell where the mighty river was much less the nearest. Archaeologists think the mound is an expansion of a natural hill. The Indians buried a hill so to speak letting it form the core of their ceremonial mounds. All the other mounds I had seen had been built from scratch allowing easy burials throughout the mound. <br /><br />I found that I climbed a pedestal from which I could see nothing, and I didn't have any sense of containment. Something is missing from Emerald Mound and when I tried to let my imagination add to it, I didn't get any sense of beavers. Here were mounds on hills commanding, I guessed, an extensive plain given over to fields of corn. Yes, I can take photos of beaver ponds showing the rounded lodge in a commanding position, but usually the true perspective puts the lodge at the lowest point in a valley, a refuge not a lookout.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TJk_Y8dM22I/AAAAAAAAUu0/D18PZWUIjJE/s1600/bpl4sept10.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TJk_Y8dM22I/AAAAAAAAUu0/D18PZWUIjJE/s400/bpl4sept10.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5519512516097268578" /></a><br /><br />Here one could get a sense of the stages of growth and domination. This was not a case of taking some tips from beavers to escape floods, but a celebration of the growth of corn and power. What was I doing when I walked up these mounds but growing and feeling bigger, perhaps too big?<br /><br />Beavers live inside their lodges. A beaver only walks up to build its lodge or dam. It finds its center when it floats in the magnificent pond it builds. It only climbs the trees it cuts after the tree crashes to the ground. Emerald Mound was the negation of a beaver centric world. <br /><br />As we headed home I had one more errant theory to test. Looking at photos of mounds, I got the impression that the mounds farther north were more rounded. The Natchez Trace Parkway goes all the way to Nashville (with no stoplights nor billboards) and passes several areas with Indian Mounds. The Trace follows old Indian trails that white pioneers also used as a road south. Of course, white pioneers built all their major cities along rivers. Jackson, Mississippi, is the only large city along the trace until you get to Nashville. As we approached Nashville we kept going down and down and down some more, which impressed on us that the Trace follows a series of hills and high plateaus. It reminded me more of the way otters travel, not beavers. Otters like to claim the high ground and then negotiate a passage from there. I could see why Indians and early pioneers, fearful of ambushes, would do the same. <br /><br />When we did see some mounds in northern Mississippi, they were indeed rounded like beaver lodges, and as southern Indian mounds go, they were small. One small group had no ceremonial sense about it. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPzz1NefFvI/AAAAAAAAWZQ/BB2Ao76IRAY/s1600/trace.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 163px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPzz1NefFvI/AAAAAAAAWZQ/BB2Ao76IRAY/s400/trace.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547576936489752306" /></a><br /><br />One group that we had to speed by at dusk had several mounds on a flat of which someone could make some sense. There were probably more beavers in these hills then along the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. A gift shop made that point by having a beaver pelt among others on display. I also wonder if the dirt closer to the alluvial plains to the south is finer necessitating mounds with a flat top, while dirt in the foothills holds its shape?<br /><br />I could begin making my own mythology: rounded burial mounds were modeled on the beaver an animal that built mounds and, farther to the north, largely lived in their mounds until the spring until the emerged in the spring as if new born.... Except even in the very cold area I live in, I often see beavers out in the winter. And if the Indians thought beavers had some purchase with the underworld, they have left absolutely no hint of it in their art and artifacts. <br /><br />We returned home through Ohio and stopped once again at Newark to see the earthworks there. I wanted to see, if after seeing the bigger southern mounds, I still got a sense of beavers when I saw the smaller Ohio mounds. Plus we had a better guide to the earthworks and we realized we had only seen half of them. An essay in the Field Museum catalogue of Hopewell Indian art made a convincing case that the Newark earthworks were oriented as an astronomical observatory highlighting important seasonal full moons. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPz0zxKdfYI/AAAAAAAAWZY/yrysDJyFUGY/s1600/newarkh.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPz0zxKdfYI/AAAAAAAAWZY/yrysDJyFUGY/s400/newarkh.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547578011221327234" /></a><br /><br />The earthworks we saw two years ago, the large circle with two mounds in the middle, weren't used in support of that argument. A local young man texting in the front seat of his car while his three kids fought in the back told us how to get to the golf course where the rest of the earthworks are. We found the course open and only a few plaques as guides, but we were enchanted. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPz00sZ2RUI/AAAAAAAAWZg/wQtwkikecjE/s1600/newarke.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPz00sZ2RUI/AAAAAAAAWZg/wQtwkikecjE/s400/newarke.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547578027123557698" /></a><br /><br />Was the mound with a tee on top of it originally flat topped or did the golf course designer do that?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPz01pU2s-I/AAAAAAAAWZo/-W2_f6Kg03s/s1600/newarkg.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPz01pU2s-I/AAAAAAAAWZo/-W2_f6Kg03s/s400/newarkg.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547578043477177314" /></a><br /><br />That the golf course encompasses the Indian earthworks probably helps preserve them and the Ohio Historical Society now owns the land which it leases to the golf club. The historical society periodically closes the course and gives tours. In the great circle earthwork in the other part of town, the surrounding embankment is greater than the two mounds in the middle. Here all the mounds were bigger than the surrounding embankment which was about half the size of the great circle embankment.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPz1yECHj_I/AAAAAAAAWZw/Ao30LjRAhkI/s1600/newarkd.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPz1yECHj_I/AAAAAAAAWZw/Ao30LjRAhkI/s400/newarkd.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547579081438498802" /></a><br /><br />Even without an overview, that is, just standing on top of one embankment, one can get a sense of a grand design, of vistas opening up in various direction with parallel walls of embankment guiding ones view and presumably ceremonial processions.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPz1yaHSMJI/AAAAAAAAWZ4/HSaEJFnH7RQ/s1600/newarkf.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TPz1yaHSMJI/AAAAAAAAWZ4/HSaEJFnH7RQ/s400/newarkf.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547579087365746834" /></a><br /><br />Beaver ponds are often built in a series of terraces following a stream. Beavers build canals that radiate from the pond allowing easier access to and transport of cut logs and branches. Beavers dredge these canals building up their banks. When drought dries up a pond, one can easily see, amidst a chaos of tree trunks, the channels and canals the beavers used when the pond was full. The beavers seem to have no concern for the heavens when fashioning this network, except to bring tall trees down to their level. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2rG2r13_I/AAAAAAAAWaA/0lbeX5fW6RI/s1600/etlodge19.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2rG2r13_I/AAAAAAAAWaA/0lbeX5fW6RI/s400/etlodge19.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547778450237284338" /></a><br /><br />It would seem to make sense to have a lodge on the north shore so that it could be warmed by the morning sun in the winter, but I often see lodges in the shade on the south shore, lodges made by beaver families that struck me over the years as being rather sagacious survivors.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2s1qJInII/AAAAAAAAWaI/96E0ff61tcc/s1600/shllodge24jan9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 284px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TP2s1qJInII/AAAAAAAAWaI/96E0ff61tcc/s400/shllodge24jan9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547780353835965570" /></a><br /><br />So it makes no sense crediting beavers for inspiring an observatory, but there were only two mammals here a thousand years ago making mounds with earth, humans and beavers. That said, we did notice that moles like to burrow their tunnels around some mounds. In Alabama we saw not a few ant hills on the plaza below the mounds. The leveling of the ground with loose soil probably attracted those animals.<br /><br />By the end of my tour, I found myself missing the mystery and confusion of beavers ponds created by the chaos of beaver-cut trees. At this time of year especially beaver lodges themselves seem alive as beavers prepared them for the winter by loading on mud and logs. Beavers create a level of water which both reflects all above and supports another world below. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQDcLTzvR5I/AAAAAAAAWcI/S1jzFeuzFXs/s1600/beaver.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/TQDcLTzvR5I/AAAAAAAAWcI/S1jzFeuzFXs/s400/beaver.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548676827774404498" /></a><br /><br />The Mound Builders leveled the ground and built mounds to dominate that ground. A beaver pond is too organic to have been the model for these magnificent ceremonial grounds of the Indians. So my working hypothesis that beavers were unimportant to Indians before the fur trade still holds despite my crazy desire to see the beavers' influence on everything grandly done in the days before they were sacrificed for European fashions.Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-35584493260651475472010-02-27T05:47:00.000-08:002010-04-08T19:26:45.390-07:00Beavers and the ElizabethansBeavers caught a break from the the Elizabethans. No Englishman seemed to grasp the importance of the fur trade, even though the French shared their understanding of its potential. In 1584 an English cleric Richard Hakluyt then chaplain for the English ambassador in Paris, visited Ettiene Bellinger in Rouen. Bellinger had just returned from trying to establish a French colony on Cape Breton in Canada. In a report written for Sir Walter Raleigh, Hakluyt described what Bellinger showed him:<br /><br />"He brought home a kind of mineral matter supposed to hold silver, whereof he gave me some; a kind of musk called castor; divers beastes skins, as bevers, otters, marternes, lucernes, seales, buffs, deere skinnes, all dressed, and painted on the innerside with divers excellent colors, as redd, tawnye, yellowe and vermillion, all which things I sawe; and divers other merchandise he hath which I saw not. But he told me he had CCCC. and xl. crowns for that in Roan, which in trifles bestowed upon the savages, stoode him not in forty crownes."<br /><br />Granted that Hakluyt's report, A Discourse Concerning Western Planting, tended to be exhaustive in listing everything that had been seen by explorers along the North America coast, but only in this passage did Hakluyt talk dollars and cents, so to speak. Since there was no silver in Cape Breton, Bellinger didn't get 440 crowns for that. He gave Hakluyt some after all. Castor, the beavers' scenting fluid, had been a valuable medicine for which European beavers had been hunted to near extinction since the height of the Roman Empire, but its doubtful there was a ready market for it. One never developed again. The deer skins, and perhaps seal skins, dressed and painted by Indians probably were of more interest as curiosities than something someone would buy and wear. That leaves beavers, otters, martens, and lucernes as the most interesting items. All, especially lucernes of rabbits, were used by European furriers, and beavers had become quite rare. <br /><br />Fortunately for beavers, Hakluyt didn't spell out the value of fur for his English readers. He gained enduring fame by collecting, editing, and publishing accounts of world travels especially to the New World. He didn't shape those accounts to promote colonization, as he did in his report of which only a few copies were made for Raleigh and his friends. For example, he had heard of a group of English gentlemen who on a kind of lark had pooled their money, outfitted a ship and sailed to Newfoundland in 1536. None of them returning wrote a word about it. Hakluyt tracked them down and cobbled together an account which described desolation, starvation, and cannibalism, English eating English. He included accounts of John Hawkins voyages, who like his father, began every trip to the New World by capturing African slaves so he would have something to trade with the Spanish. <br /><br />Hakluyt recognized that the French had more experience in exploring North America, so while in France, he collected and translated the accounts of Jacques Cartier which had been ignored and quickly forgotten by the French whose colonial schemes had been put on hold by drawn out civil unrest at home.<br /><br />Fortunately, for beavers and other fur bearers, that passage about them in Hakluyt's report did not register with Raleigh. In the 16th century national goals were often pursued through personal monopolies, so one man could make a big difference. In 1578 the Queen gave Sir Humphrey Gilbert a patent for six years conferring on him the exclusive right to colonize the New World for England. Mortgaging his property in England, and finding partners to join him, Gilbert organized an expedition of 5 ships and 225 men that landed in Newfoundland in the summer of 1583. By that date, European fishermen had been working the Grand Banks south of Newfoundland for over 50 years. Natives had fled the southern coastal area so the main distraction for Gilbert was keeping his colonists from hitching passage back to England as the fishing ships filled with cod headed home. He did not trade with Indians but with fishermen. However, they had been trading with Indians for years and Gilbert listed all the commodities found in Newfoundland including fur bearers, but his informants didn't really spell it out for him. He listed "beastes of sundry kindes" including beavers but the only animal that made an impression was black fox reputed be in the north of the island, "whose furre is esteemed very riche in some countries in Europe." They caught one animal which they thought was a black sable, not an inconsiderable find because black sable was the most value fur exported from Russia. But far more important to Gilbert was that the "mineral man" that he brought with him, a Saxon, found what he was sure was silver ore. After the colonist sailed on to find a warmer place to spend the winter, Gilbert and many of his men drowned in a wreck off Cape Breton. The Saxon mineral man and the ore were also lost, much to the consternation of the survivors. No one was quite sure what happened to the supposed sable.<br /><br />Sir Walter Raleigh was Gilbert's younger half brother and Queen Elizabeth graciously transferred and extended the patent to colonize the New World to him. Raleigh had followed Gilbert's path to royal favor, both had left studying the law to fight with Protestants in France, went on privateering expeditions against the Spanish and then fought the Irish. While Gilbert was a loyal and enterprising royal servant, Raleigh became much more. Perhaps his good looks, stunning attire and gracious manner explain his rise,<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S4kwEoIQgjI/AAAAAAAAQx0/2R4I952sqhY/s1600-h/WalterRaleigh_1588.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 327px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S4kwEoIQgjI/AAAAAAAAQx0/2R4I952sqhY/s400/WalterRaleigh_1588.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442934480703619634" border="0"></a><br /><br />not to mention the legend of his spreading his mantle over a puddle as the Queen approached. But there is a dark side to his rise to power. The Queen rewarded him for his service in Ireland which was notable in one respect. In 1580 after Irish forces and their Italian allies surrendered in Smerwick because they were outgunned, all, save for a handful of European officers who could be ransomed, were put to the sword. A chronicler described it dispassionately: "Captain Ralegh together with Captain Macworth, who had ward of the day, entered the castle, and made a great slaughter. Many or most of them put to the sword." In his dispatch about Smerwick, Lord Grey who gave the orders, wrote of six hundred bodies stripped and laid out in the sand.<br /><br />Until certain state papers were made public in the late 19th century it was thought the Queen agreed with other contemporaries who disapproved of the slaughter. She didn't and she rewarded Raleigh with Irish estates, and until she died he was one of her principal advisers on Irish affairs. He advocated a policy of colonizing the land with Englishmen, and to make that easier he tried to starve Irish peasants and assassinate Irish leaders and sticking their heads on pikes for all to see. (That was a time honored tradition and not an innovation by Raleigh.) While he brought the potato and tobacco to Ireland, he made his killing when he secured a monopoly on Irish forests and cut every oak in sight for shipping to Britain and the continent for staves. What would become the English passion for killing Indians and cutting trees was thoroughly rehearsed in Ireland by Raleigh. <br /> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S65fRLYX-eI/AAAAAAAARVg/sc5biw30akg/s1600/irishenglish.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 224px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S65fRLYX-eI/AAAAAAAARVg/sc5biw30akg/s400/irishenglish.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453400947509688802" /></a><br /><br />As vexing as Ireland was, Raleigh wrote that it was "that commonweal of common woe," it did not anger the English in the way Spain did. Spanish ships bearing New World gold distracted all her rivals. Not for nothing did Bellinger begin his show and tell about fur, by holding up reputed silver ore before Hakluyt. Cartier had been embarrassed when the ore he brought back proved to be worthless, but 40 years later Bellinger still hoped to strike it rich. French exploration usually got more direct royal support making it less of a speculation for the undertakers. When Raleigh began carrying out the designs of his brother-in-law, financing a series of expeditions to the New World, he made some strategic adjustments. Gilbert had taken the northern route to the New World because it was the quickest. Raleigh sent his ships by the southern route because he wanted his colony to be more convenient for launching attacks on Spanish gold ships. Yet he understood that the Queen and nation did not want a colony of pirates. Riches had to found in what lands the English claimed, preferably gold or silver to rival the Spanish hoard.<br /><br />The Indians in Roanoke on what would become the North Carolina coast tried to show the English the way to a profitable arrangement, and Barlowe, the captain of the first expedition Raleigh sent, in 1584, almost seemed to get it. When Indians came to parley, Barlowe laid out his wares and the Indians laid out deer skins. Barlowe traded a copper kettle for fifty skins, which he considered worth fifty crowns. But there is no evidence that he returned to England with any furs. (While the trade in deer skins became excessive, in its early stage it was a byproduct of hunting. The Indians were making full use of an animal they killed to eat, a practice for which they are widely praised. With the exception of bear, the food value of furbearers was far less important than the value of their fur.) Barlowe did not stay long and did not return with any ore, but he was particular in describing the Indians use of copper ornaments and pearls. And he brought two Indians back with him.<br /><br />Raleigh then outfitted an expedition of over 100 colonists under the command of Richard Grenville, his cousin and an experience privateer. While Raleigh didn't go personally -- being a courtier required being at court near the Queen, he sent three leading men that represented three facets of his, and, we might say, the Elizabethan personality. Grenville represented the hatred of the Spanish and he soon left the colony to capture gold ships and attack the Spanish in the Azores. He left Ralph Lane behind to govern the colony. Raleigh had recruited Lane from Ireland, which didn't bode well for the Indians in Roanoke. He proved an able exponent of Elizabethan rapacity. Barlowe had marveled at how bountiful food was in the country, and that the Indians gladly shared it. Lane befriended Indians long enough to get a bead on the source of the greatest pearls and "a marvelous and most strange mineral." Soon his men faced starvation and Indians suspicious of their vain quest.<br /><br />Raleigh also sent his math tutor Thomas Hariot, a scholar who had learned the Indian language from the Indians Barlowe brought back with him and who returned to their home with Hariot. In Hariot's "briefe and true report" of his year in the Roanoke Colony we see by proxy how Raleigh's better nature approached colonization. Lane wrote the narrative of the search for pearls and minerals, and a long justification of why the head of Indian "king" had to be cut off during a massacre initiated with the cry of "Christ Our Victory". Hariot wrote a prospectus to prove that the colony could be profitable, sustainable, and unopposed by the natives. He wrote about that infinite variety which seemed the playthings of the Elizabethan mind. Yet here was variety with no bottom line. Like many Elizabethan thinkers, Hariot had a weakness for analogy and the magical. <br /><br />The first "merchantable commodity" he described was "Silke of grasse or grasse Silke." "...It groweth two foote and a halfe high or better: the blades are about two foot in length, and half inch broad. The like groweth in Persia, which is in the selfe same climate as Virginia, of which very many of the silke workes that come from thence into Europe are made. Here of if it be planted and ordered as in Persia, it cannot in reason be otherwise, but that there will rise in shorte time great profite to the dealers therein."<br /><br />In 19th century the beaver hats for which millions of beavers died were supplanted in the world of fashion by silk hat. None of that silk came from Carolina silk grass. <br /><br />Fur is well down on Hariot's list of merchantable commodities, after worm silke, flaxe, hemp, allum, pitch, tarre, rozen and turpentine, sassafras, cedar, wine, and oyle. And he is only sure of otter pelts: "All along the Sea coast there are great store of Otters, which beeyng taken by weares and other engines made for the purpose, will yeelde good profite. Wee hope also of Marterne furres, and make no doubt by the relation of the people but that in some places of the countrey there are store: although there were but two skinnes that came to our handes. Luzarnes also we have vnderstanding of although for the time we saw none." Despite this encouragement to kill otters along the North Carolina coast, it appears they survived well enough. John James Audubon once counted 42 swimming in Ablemarle Sound. Trading for fur did not excite these early colonists.<br /><br />He did not mention tobacco as an exportable commodity, though he extolled its pleasures and medicinal properties in another section of his tract. Hariot did not go on at length about the virtues of sassafrass but that's the commodity that soon filled the ships leaving the Virginia coast. He noted its medicinal properties and referred readers to Monardus's "Joyful Newes from the West Indies," for "the description, the manner of vsing and the manifolde vertues thereof." Monardus claimed that sassafrass could cure many diseases including syphillis, and since there was an epidemic of same, sassafrass became the magical New World import almost as valuable as gold. Raleigh asked for and received the sassafrass monopoly from the Queen.<br /><br />Hariot's sense of magic informed his proof that a colony could feed itself: "with lesse then foure and twentie houres labour," one man may "prepare and husbane so much grounde... as shall yeelde him victuall in a large proportion" for a year. Despite that assurance, the men and women who tried to establish a permanent colony failed, though what happened to the "Lost Colony" at Roanoke remains a mystery. <br /><br />Hariot ends his report with a magical description of the Indians, who, he assured investors, were no threat: "They are a people clothed with loose mantles made of Deere skins, & aprons of the same rounde about their middles; all els naked; of such a difference of statures only as wee in England; having no edge tooles or weapons of yron or steele to offend vs withall, neither know they how to make any: those weapons that they have are onlie bowes made of Witch hazle, & arrowes of reeds; flat edged truncheons also of wood about a yard long, neither have they any thing to<br />defend themselves but targets made of barcks; and some armours made of stickes wickered together with thread."<br /><br />John White, who was also on the voyage, made drawings of the Indians and their world. The drawings should have been revelatory but unfortunately he was as mannered in his drawing as Hariot was in his writing. He left us with a collection of curious nudes and no real men. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S65aZ3jtkoI/AAAAAAAARVY/drux6tLTz3s/s1600/hariot49.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 289px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S65aZ3jtkoI/AAAAAAAARVY/drux6tLTz3s/s400/hariot49.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453395599249216130" /></a> <br /><br />His drawings of the Indians towns and fields are probably too orderly. However, his drawing of how the Indians made their dugouts with fire, despite rather exuberant flames, probably does capture the excitement and skillful use of fire by the Indians.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S76QFeFkAeI/AAAAAAAARy4/8jIxweWc5kM/s1600/hariot67.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 279px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S76QFeFkAeI/AAAAAAAARy4/8jIxweWc5kM/s400/hariot67.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5457958222069760482" /></a><br /><br />After extolling the magical medicinal properties of sassafrass and tobacco, Hariot described how after the English visited the disparate Indian villages, a disease, that the Indians did not recognize and could not cure, killed off most of the villagers. But this happened only in those Indian villages that did not welcome the English suffered: "There was no towne where we had any subtile devise practised against vs, we leaving it unpunished or not revenged (because wee sought by all meanes possible to win them by gentlenesse) but that within a few dayes after our departure from everie such towne, the people began to die very fast...."<br /><br />Both the Indians and the English attributed this to the power of the English god. Indeed some Indians thought the English in their midst must be gods. The Indian medicine men said the English had come back from the dead -- they had no women and didn't care for Indian women, and they killed with invisible bullets. Hariot didn't want to dispel that notion, and assured investors that through "discreet dealing and governement" the Indians could be taught to "honour, obey, feare and love us." He did know of the Indians Lane's soldiers killed and faulted Lane for being "too fierce." That said, all the colonists were easily persuaded to return to England.<br /><br />On his return to England, Hariot's report was published on its own and in some editions illustrated with White's drawings. White returned to Roanoke again, as the new governor, this time leaving colonists who would stay, only to become the stuff of legend, the Lost Colony. <br /><br />Raleigh's reputation was not sullied by the failure of his colonial schemes. He played a major role in the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588. However his secret marriage to one of the Queens ladies-in-waiting in 1592 led to his wings being clipped at court. He decided to regain favor by personally making an expedition to the New World. But he did not take Hariot's report as a guide, nor look for the Lost Colony, nor resume Lane's search for that unusual mineral. He went in search of El Dorado on a hunch that the stories that put it at the head of the Orinoco River were true.<br /><br />There are no beavers along the Orinoco. Some still think El Dorado will be found there. Raleigh returned with some ore of disputed value, but he was sure there was gold there, which in cavalier Elizabeth fashion he thought sufficient to prompt the English to take control of the river. "Where there is store of gold it is in effect needless to remember other commodities for trade."<br /><br />To be sure, as if by rote, Raleigh adds a list of other inducements: brazil-wood, cotton, silk, balsum, gums, pepper, all better than can be found in Europe, and "divers berries that dye a most perfect crimson and carnation; and for painting, all France, Italy, or the East Indies yield none such. For the more the skin is washed, the fairer the colour appeareth, and with which even those brown and tawny women spot themselves and colour their cheeks." <br /><br />Raleigh's account of his travels impressed Henry David Thoreau, who thought it, along with his poetry and "History of the World," raised him to the highest rank of Elizabethan writers, the epitome of the Elizabethan gentleman, as good with the pen as he was with the sword. Thoreau even forgave Raleigh's insistence that along the Orinoco there was a race of headless men:<br /><br />"Next unto Arui there are two rivers Atoica and Caura, and on that branch which is called Caura are a nation of people whose heads appear not above their shoulders; which though it may be thought a mere fable, yet for mine own part I am resolved it is true, because every child in the provinces of Aromaia and Canuri affirm the same. They are called Ewaipanoma; they are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, and that a long train of hair groweth backward between their shoulders. The son of Topiawari, which I brought with me into England, told me that they were the most mighty men of all the land, and use bows, arrows, and clubs thrice as big as any of Guiana, or of the Orenoqueponi; and that one of the Iwarawaqueri took a prisoner of them the year before our arrival there, and brought him into the borders of Aromaia, his father's country. And farther, when I seemed to doubt of it, he told me that it was no wonder among them; but that they were as great a nation and as common as any other in all the provinces, and had of late years slain many hundreds of his father's people, and of other nations their neighbours."<br /><br />Of course, a race of headless warriors is also found in the pages of Herodotus. And after Raleigh made them au courrant, they found their way into Shakespeare's Othello. To the doge and other Venetians Othello explains how Desdemona came to love him:<br /><br />And portance in my travels' history:<br />Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,<br />Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven<br />It was my hint to speak,--such was the process;<br />And of the Cannibals that each other eat,<br />The Anthropophagi and men whose heads<br />Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear<br />Would Desdemona seriously incline: <br /><br />Thoreau wrote a biography of Raleigh which was unpublished in his lifetime only because the magazine for which it was intended, the Dial, folded. Like Thoreau, Raleigh had a direct, manly way with words. The New World connection cinched Thoreau's love of the man. He writes in the biography: "None of the worthies of that age can be duly appreciated if we neglect to consider them in relation to the New World." This is a theme that Elizabethans were inspired by the New World is frequently sounded by British and American scholars, but I see little evidence for it. First it is important to recognize the New World relations of Raleigh that excited contemporaries was not the equivocal attempt at a colony in North America, but the quest for gold in South America.<br /><br />When Queen Elizabeth's favorite character, Sir John Falstaff, unfolds his plot to seduce Mistresses Page and Ford to his cronies, Sir John describes, not beavers nor silk grass, but gold from the Orinoco:<br /><br />O, she did so course o'er my exteriors with such a<br />greedy intention, that the appetite of her eye did<br />seem to scorch me up like a burning-glass! Here's<br />another letter to her: she bears the purse too; she<br />is a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty. I will<br />be cheater to them both, and they shall be<br />exchequers to me; they shall be my East and West<br />Indies, and I will trade to them both. Go bear thou<br />this letter to Mistress Page; and thou this to<br />Mistress Ford: we will thrive, lads, we will thrive. <br /><br />Secondly, in the battle for royal and public favor, a man who had been to the New World was not a hero like a modern astronaut. He had opened himself to ridicule. The New World was a hard sell. Not for nothing did Raleigh begin his reports on his exploration with many paragraphs excoriating the malicious falsehoods of his opponents who spread rumors that the ore he brought back from the Orinoco was worthless or that he didn't go to the New World at all and simply hid in Cornwall.<br /><br />There is no doubt that Shakespeare knew Raleigh. He started the Mermaid Club, where wits gathered every Friday, and Shakespeare was a member and doubtless there he snagged lines referring to the New World, but there is no evidence that he shared Raleigh's enthusiasm. The Tempest is a rather equivocal embrace of the New World. True, the phrase "Brave New World" comes from it, but Miranda says it when she realizes that the world is filled with other men like Fernando. Caliban may symbolize the enslaved Indians of the New World but Shakespeare uses him as a butt to ridicule the sporadic fascination of things from the New World in the London of his day. On seeing Caliban trying to hide, Stephano observes:<br /><br />A strange fish! Were I in England now,<br />as once I was, and had but this fish painted,<br />not a holiday fool there but would give a piece<br />of silver: there would this monster make a<br />man; any strange beast there makes a man:<br />when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame<br />beggar, they will lazy out ten to see a dead<br />Indian.<br /><br />King James I was in the audience for the first production of The Tempest and if Shakespeare read James's diatribe against tobacco, that may have informed Shakespeare's play more than Raleigh. James argued that if men wanted to smoke tobacco like Indians, "... shall we, I say, without blushing, abase our selves so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians, slaves to the Spaniards, refuse to the world, and as yet aliens from the holy Covenant of God? Why doe we not as well imitate them in walking naked as they doe? in preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes, to golde and precious stones, as they do? yea why do we not denie God and adore the Devill, as they doe?"<br /><br />James faulted the Indians for giving away their gold so cheaply. In attacking the Spanish New World trade, the king engaged in same envious spitting and made tobacco the symbol of the sorry situation that the English best avoid. The best that can be said for the Tempest as an argument for the New World is that mindful that he was the leader of the King's Players, Shakespeare at once played to James's prejudices, mocking Caliban and making clear that everybody else was eager to get back home to Italy. But the play certainly raises the issue of new worlds to conquer. Thoughts of both the newly found colony at Jamestown and Raleigh might have crossed James's mind. James had imprisoned Raleigh in the Tower, sentenced to the death for involvement in an early plot to depose the king. Raleigh had freedom enough to write, conduct chemical experiments and petitioned the king promising him all the gold the kingdom needed if he was allowed to return to the Orinoco. It's plausible that Shakespeare wrote the Tempest to subliminally remind the King of how useful a Prospero Raleigh might be.<br /><br />After his trip to the Orinoco didn't put him back in the Queen's favor, Raleigh no longer patronized attempts to colonize the New World. In 1602, the Earl of Southampton, less interested in a perch from which to attack the Spanish, encouraged a voyage to scout northern areas, and soon was treated with a glowing report about an island off the coast of Massachusetts. Once there, the expedition led by Gosnold and chronicled by Brereton, had the fur trade thrust upon them by the Indians. A group approached them and after sitting on the ground motioned for the English to do the same. They did, then Gosnold sent Brereton over to them. He recognized an Indian with whom he had given a knife two days before. They smiled and then the chief of the Indians stood "and took a large Beaver skin from one that stood about him, and gave it unto me, which I requited for that time the best I could: but I pointing toward captaine Gosnold made signs unto him, that he was our captaine...."<br /><br />Then they all sealed their friendship over a meal, the English getting meat from their ship, one of the rare instances of the English feeding the Indians. And then they got down to trading "So the rest of the day we spent trading with them trading for Furres, which are Beaver, Luzernes, Martens, Otters, Wilde Cat skins very large and deepe Furre, blacke Foxes, conie skinnes, of the colour of our Hares but somewhat less, Deere skinnes very large, Seale skinnes, other beasts skinnes to us unknown." However there is no accounting: the value of the furs less the value of what was traded for them. Then Brereton's report discussed at length what really interested the English, the copper trinkets the Indians wore and the prospects that there were other mines of more valuable ores. For sure Indians were dazzled by European trinkets, but, in these early days, the trinkets of the Indians dazzled the Europeans. Copper looked too much like gold. It was almost as if they traded for furs primarily to humor the Indians in hopes of learning about things of real value. They did bring the furs back to England, but also filled their ship with cedar and sassafrass. <br /><br />It was that last import that got them in trouble with Sir Walter Raleigh who still had the sassafrass monopoly from the Queen. In recognition of that a deal was struck. The account of the voyage was dedicated to Raleigh, if not the proceeds from the sale of sassafrass.<br /><br />As I mentioned before, Raleigh opposed the succession of James IV of Scotland to the English crown in 1603. However, in 1617 James granted Raleigh his wish, and let him sail to the Orinoco to find gold for the king on a promise that he would not attack the Spanish. However, he became ill in Trinidad and most of the men he sent on up the Orinoco, including his son, were killed in skirmishes with the Spanish. Raleigh returned to London, and on James's order his head was cut off in 1618. The beavers lost an unwitting friend. In a few years the English fur trade would begin in earnest.Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-32056759560177681772010-01-10T04:25:00.000-08:002012-11-04T07:18:33.858-08:00What beavers meant to pre-contact IndiansOn a cold winter day, well below freezing, with crusted snow in the woods and meadows and thick ice on the pond, I feel like I can go anywhere. For Indians, winter was never a time to hunker down and hide in a hole. And even when snow and ice conditions deteriorate humans with only two legs have a great advantage over larger animals with four legs. <br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SzUFlHA-JRI/AAAAAAAAOtc/sGOSW-WcMDc/s1600-h/lstks17dec9.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SzUFlHA-JRI/AAAAAAAAOtc/sGOSW-WcMDc/s400/lstks17dec9.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5419243861706679570" /></a><br /><br />Before contact with Europeans, winter must have been solely a season for hunting large game and migration. The fur trade made winter the season for trapping because the thicker, darker winter fur was what the trade demanded. <br /><br />I find that the easiest animals to see in the winter, even on the colder days, are deer and porcupines. Deer provided Indians with a generous portion of meat and their hide can be use for clothing, shelter, and drum heads. Porcupines were prized as food for Indians, and their quills were dyed and used to decorate clothing. (The patience Indian women had to do anything with quills mystifies me.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bobarnebeck.com/pp29a.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 435px; height: 500px;" src="http://bobarnebeck.com/pp29a.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />Unlike the deer and porcupine, beavers do not spend every winter day foraging for food out in the open air. They cache food in the fall so that a goodly portion of it is covered by ice as their pond freezes. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S4bcaN8gbuI/AAAAAAAAQxs/ZeN5lHVE7Zs/s1600-h/cache25.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 210px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S4bcaN8gbuI/AAAAAAAAQxs/ZeN5lHVE7Zs/s400/cache25.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442279542701977314" /></a><br /><br />The beaver can go from lodge to cache under the ice to get food. Beavers also overeat in the fall so that they can sleep away the coldest winter days. However, eventually many beavers make a hole in the ice and, if the temperature is over 20F, they might come out to collect more trees and branches,<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/MyVUlFMxTvA?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />They sometimes sit on the ice of their pond complacently stripping and eating the bark that is their principal food. So hunting beaver in the winter requires a modicum of patience if you wait for the beaver to come out, or a good bit of hard work if you choose to force the beaver out of its lodge or pond. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bobarnebeck.com/lsuplodge6.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://bobarnebeck.com/lsuplodge6.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />Most beavers pack their lodges with mud in the fall and the mud freezes into a hard armor. Beavers did not learn to do this to thwart human hunters, but large canines like wolves and wolverines. By the way, while having two legs is an advantage going after deer, it's not that advantageous operating on ice, or if you fall through the ice. Finally even setting traps for beavers is not that easy since traps have to be checked periodically lest a coyote or fox steal the trapped animal. And remember, easy travel during winter gives you an itch to roam, and following deer might take you far from the swamps where beavers are confined.<br /><br />By mid-January the ponds usually freeze hard enough to attract trappers. Before the advent of ATV's trappers probably headed to the ponds earlier, but no trapper now moves without an ATV. <br /><br />Even though the fur trade was instrumental in the expulsion and near extermination of Indians, they still embrace the trapping of animals, especially the beaver, as a part of their heritage worthy of celebration. Since Indians have no recorded history in the European sense, their relationship with beavers before Europeans came is a matter of conjecture. Indians and the anthropologists who study them have embraced the Indian oral tradition as a valid description of the Indians understanding of nature. Although Indian legends don't pinpoint the Indians' use of beavers in the way a fur trader's manifest might, most people accept the special relationship between man and beaver that those legends suggest. To wit, the Indian and the beaver were brothers.<br /><br />My working thesis is that before the fur trade, Indians had no special relationship with beavers and that the importance beavers and fur came to have for Indians arose because of the trade. The beaver hat became the fashion in Europe, so claiming a special relationship with beavers became the fashion among Indians. After all, as they traded fur for trinkets, they thought they were getting the better of the bargain. So a chief might relish a beaver robe not as an ancient accoutrement of honor but as the new symbol of wealth. <br /><br />While most Europeans were primarily interested in the economic and political possibilities of the fur trade, Jesuit priests in Canada looked for contradictions in Indian customs that they could exploit in their crusade to convert Indians to Christianity. In the process, they described Indian behavior more to ridicule than to embellish an understanding of the Indian worldview. However, they managed to convert many Indians to Christianity and as they did, the strategic importance of the fur trade in that "holy" mission was clear to the Jesuits. So while they demonized Indian customs, they did not demonize the beaver and I think their observations on the relationship of Indians and beavers are reliable.<br /><br />The Jesuits in Canada sent annual reports and frequent letters to their superiors in France that were then published to garner donations to the cause of converting the Indians. Father Paul le Jeune, mostly by virtue of his conviction that African slaves should be taught to read and write, has fared well in the pages of history. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S4apty0eAHI/AAAAAAAAQxk/azJizLbsOeE/s1600-h/Paul_Le_Jeune.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 369px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S4apty0eAHI/AAAAAAAAQxk/azJizLbsOeE/s400/Paul_Le_Jeune.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442223803924873330" /></a><br /><br />In 1634 he wrote extensively about his efforts to convert the Montagnais Indians who lived north of the lower reaches of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. He wouldn't allow that the Indians had a religion, just a superstition. And he was amused at their prayers:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Their Religion, or rather their superstition, consists besides in praying; but O, my God, what prayers they make! In the morning, when the little children come out from their Cabins, they shout, Cacouakhi, Pakhais Amiscouakhi, Pakhais Mousouakhi, Pakhais, "Come, Porcupines; come, Beavers; come, Elk; " and this is all of their prayers.</span> (The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents Volume 6 CHAPTER IV. ON THE BELIEF, SUPERSTITIONS, AND ERRORS OF THE MONTAGNAIS SAVAGES Relation of what occurred in New France on the Great River St. Lawrence, in the year one thousand six hundred thirty-four)<br /><br />How can we tell if Indian children made the same prayer in 1434? Can we analyze the prayer and argue that while an Indian child might come upon a porcupine or elk as it walked in nearby woods and fields, there was a far less likelihood of crossing paths with a beaver? So these children were, in a sense, praying for the trinkets beaver pelts bring, and that before the Europeans came beavers would be well down on the list of animals worth eating.Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-28894042854509305212010-01-10T04:16:00.000-08:002012-11-05T08:23:27.176-08:00Death and Destruction in Shangri-la PondThat I call it Shangri-la Pond has nothing to do with beavers, and perhaps the death of one beaver<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/R6vMWflMmxI/AAAAAAAAABA/cE1KhD2YfmY/s1600-h/deadbvd27dec7.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/R6vMWflMmxI/AAAAAAAAABA/cE1KhD2YfmY/s320/deadbvd27dec7.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5164446084517108498" border="0" /></a><br /><br />and catastrophic failure of the dam there<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/ShqX6gdtTcI/AAAAAAAAJNk/AN4qLTssiEo/s1600-h/shldambust13may9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 241px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/ShqX6gdtTcI/AAAAAAAAJNk/AN4qLTssiEo/s400/shldambust13may9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5339747339603889602" /></a><br /><br />has nothing to do with the history of the fur trade. Shangri-la is or was a mythical valley in the foothills of the Himalayas where people were ageless and nature guileless. My wife and I discovered our Shangri-la in the late 1970s when we veered off a trail in Wellesley Island State Park and tried to walk up a small creek flowing down between two granite cliffs. The creek watered a valley that was choked with a variety of plants that we didn't think could exist outside of a rain forest. We gave up trying to walk up the creek and climbed up the cliff where hemlocks precariously hung. During the late 70s the island was well watered. Our feet were always getting wet no matter where we went. My wife blames porcupines and I blame the droughts of the 80s for killing the hemlocks. <br /><br />The slow progression of beavers up a creek that drains into South Bay eventually required the damming of the little creek that drained our Shangri-la. So Shangri-la Pond was born. I remember one warm fall day when we sat high up on the granite ridge and watched two large beavers sunning themselves on their new lodge on the south side of the now widening creek. Of the many shrubs that choked Shangri-la, the beavers left only a few button bushes. They had trees enough to eventually make three lodges in the pond. <br /><br />The pond struck me as a hard one for beavers to live in. The valley ran east-west, angled so that it got only a few hours of sun each day in the winter. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2pDZA8t-6I/AAAAAAAAQcc/3pCtS2DN_tg/s1600-h/shldam26mar9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2pDZA8t-6I/AAAAAAAAQcc/3pCtS2DN_tg/s400/shldam26mar9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434229997406387106" /></a><br /><br />The pond ice froze thick. In January 2000 the beavers chewed through six inches of ice to make a hole next to their lodge <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xKo-3HpqI/AAAAAAAAQc0/qQAtExbYbic/s1600-h/sppondhole25.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xKo-3HpqI/AAAAAAAAQc0/qQAtExbYbic/s400/sppondhole25.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434800918258755234" /></a><br /><br />so that they could walk west <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xKpBQDAYI/AAAAAAAAQc8/EU0cB5xAcfY/s1600-h/beaverice5.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xKpBQDAYI/AAAAAAAAQc8/EU0cB5xAcfY/s400/beaverice5.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434800918900179330" /></a><br /><br />to where the granite walls ended so they could climb up slopes where they could find maples and oaks. That spring as they made their dam higher they began to flood a boardwalk trail that cut across the open area north of the pond proper. The park authorities put a pipe through the dam to lower the water level. I wasn't surprised when the beavers left, returning to the East Trail Pond, their last home. It supported them for several more years. <br /><br />The East Trail Pond was much larger than Shangri-la Pond. They eventually had five lodges allowing them to easily adjust to different water levels and, what I assume are, different times to best eat certain vegetation. For example, they seemed to relish a certain fern flourishing up pond during the spring. I really thought they would never leave because there was always a good flow of water into the pond. In the winter of 2003 the otters put a hole in the dam that drained most of the water out, but the beavers seemed to have no trouble repairing the dam and restoring the pond in the spring. Then in the winter of 2005, another otter hole drained the pond, <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S3By3Aor9SI/AAAAAAAAQds/_cYPmO6iyKE/s1600-h/et6b.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S3By3Aor9SI/AAAAAAAAQds/_cYPmO6iyKE/s400/et6b.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5435971039625213218" /></a><br /><br />And the beavers left by May, for good, leaving a green meadow and a small pool of frogbit encrusted water.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S3B0TTOc7GI/AAAAAAAAQd0/tvw9VzonGEs/s1600-h/et3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S3B0TTOc7GI/AAAAAAAAQd0/tvw9VzonGEs/s400/et3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5435972625163414626" /></a><br /><br />They didn't even check the viability of Shangri-la Pond with its three empty lodges and no beavers. I don't know where they went. Meanwhile another beaver family had been moving back and forth between two small ponds to the west of Shangri-la. The names I gave to the series of three ponds they used were Shortcut Trail Pond, Meander Pond and Thicket Pond. I first noticed this family when it wintered in Shortcut Trail Pond in 1999-2000, then it wintered in Meander Pond, then it moved back to Shortcut Trail Pond, then it moved up to winter in Thicket Pond, then back to Meander Pond, then back to Thicket Pond, then I was sure the family would move to Shangri-la Pond or the East Trail Pond, both larger than Meander and Thicket ponds combined, but they didn't. I theorized that beavers would not violate the territory of other beavers even years after they had left that territory. <br /><br />Life in Meander and Thicket Ponds was not easy. Meander Pond was nothing more than a long meandering channel with a series of canals dug off it. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xNctNzzcI/AAAAAAAAQdE/59YBzXxbWa4/s1600-h/mpcanal30.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xNctNzzcI/AAAAAAAAQdE/59YBzXxbWa4/s400/mpcanal30.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434804005898538434" /></a><br /><br />Over the years the beavers managed to build two lodges, about ten yards apart, and dig two burrows, one close to the lodges and the other near the dam. During a drought in the late summer of 2001 they survived by dredging,<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SW9_-2zyXNI/AAAAAAAAEeQ/C2ukw-9lVPQ/s1600-h/mpdredg6s1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5291588805024963794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SW9_-2zyXNI/AAAAAAAAEeQ/C2ukw-9lVPQ/s400/mpdredg6s1.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />making a deeper channel between their lodge and the burrow close to it.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SX3UJ_NbDoI/AAAAAAAAEsY/m5empyy2o9Q/s1600-h/mpond25s1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5295622004909215362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SX3UJ_NbDoI/AAAAAAAAEsY/m5empyy2o9Q/s400/mpond25s1.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In late September they went downstream fashioning a lodge in the dam of Short-cut Trail pond. But in the Spring of 2002 they moved back to Meander Pond, and then in the Spring of 2003 moved to Thicket Pond where they had one lodge, that was very hard to see, <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xTXnEkh5I/AAAAAAAAQdM/7UnSYNVwu1k/s1600-h/tplodge1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xTXnEkh5I/AAAAAAAAQdM/7UnSYNVwu1k/s400/tplodge1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434810515419596690" /></a><br /><br />and one small burrow. They flourished because they dug deep channels around and throughout a thicket of buttonbushes. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xVm5QKiDI/AAAAAAAAQdU/gukS6jjv1YY/s1600-h/thicket14.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 294px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xVm5QKiDI/AAAAAAAAQdU/gukS6jjv1YY/s400/thicket14.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434812977021356082" /></a><br /><br />Beavers don't eat buttonbushes and that shrub leafs out late but thickly and that shade all summer kept the water in their channels from evaporating. Their secrets to winter survival in both Meander and Thicket ponds were the channels they dug from their lodge to springs along the north shore of the ponds. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xWe34nMcI/AAAAAAAAQdc/Wjj8k-zzXvw/s1600-h/tphole18.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 279px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2xWe34nMcI/AAAAAAAAQdc/Wjj8k-zzXvw/s400/tphole18.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434813938726810050" /></a><br /><br />Thicket Pond was at the top of a small watershed and precious little of its water flowed into Meander Pond just below it. These beavers didn't need a creek flowing in, just springs and dirt to dig into so they could pond water.<br /><br />Because of their skill at surviving in such small ponds, I counted this family as exceptional. As I learned more about the fur trade, I wondered if the example of this family was exceptional enough to be the rule. Yes, because beavers so obviously shaped the land, they were easy to find and kill. These beavers showed me survival with minimal impact on the terrain, though large oaks were cut down. <br /><br />Then they moved out of the rut they had been in for almost ten years. In what proved to be their last winter in Thicket Pond, they built a new lodge right in the midst of the tangle of buttonbushes, the "thickets" of "Thicket Pond." Then in the spring they moved down to Shangri-la Pond, which at that time wasn't much of a pond, merely two rivulets meeting in a pool behind an old dam with a pipe through the middle draining out any water that got too uppity.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2pGoAEDdXI/AAAAAAAAQck/kktzlLVT6ao/s1600-h/shl31july7.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 350px; height: 263px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2pGoAEDdXI/AAAAAAAAQck/kktzlLVT6ao/s400/shl31july7.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434233553401640306" /></a><br /><br />The built a lodge below the wall of the cliff south of the pond and they began doing what they'd done so well the last eight years I'd watched them. They dredged deeper channels. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2pHiGgH2CI/AAAAAAAAQcs/35vV-QvWGXw/s1600-h/shlchan13aug7.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 263px; height: 350px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2pHiGgH2CI/AAAAAAAAQcs/35vV-QvWGXw/s400/shlchan13aug7.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434234551562393634" /></a><br /><br />Of course the beavers I had been seeing over those eight years were the matriarch and patriarch. Since they survived in such small ponds, I hoped that by focusing on them I could help prove a thesis floating around among beaver watchers that beaver couples adjusted the size of their families to suit available resources. But this pair -- beavers are monogamous -- did not stint on making kits. They seemed to have two or three most years. I have no idea where all their offspring went, but I did see how kits in this family became serious dredgers by the fall. Other beaver kits I had seen in September were generally goofing around with siblings or haphazardly imitating the foraging or dam building techniques of adults. The only time I saw five month old kits dredging was in Thicket Pond. And then in Shangri-la Pond. So attuned was this family to dredging that all the beavers in the colony seemed to swim in an up and down manner so that they were always raising mud thereby keeping it loose, and then they would frequently collect an armful and push it up on the edge of the channel. Yes, beavers survive by building dams and flooding valleys to get to more trees, but as these beavers taught me, they also survive by simply dredging channels deeper.<br /><br />I won't digress here and describe the differing styles of kit-rearing that I've noticed in beavers, but in Shangri-la Pond discipline seemed the watch word. I once saw a kit so sternly chastised by an adult that it fled back to the lodge and whined almost to the pitch of human crying. And it was in Shangri-la Pond that I first noticed what I've now noticed with other beaver families: adults try to curb the enthusiasm of kits when there is a danger of falling trees. This must have been a difficult lesson to teach when the pond was essentially a nexus of deep channels. Kits must have seemed oblivious to falling trees as they swam between banks a few feet apart that rose two feet above the water level in the channel. The response of one adult beaver, at least, was to keep kits away from trees that might fall. In early December I watched an adult turn from its gnawing on bark to face down a kit that tried to climb out of the channel and approach its mother.<br /></p><br /><br /><p><embed id="VideoPlayback" style="WIDTH: 400px; HEIGHT: 326px" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="" hl="en"></embed> </p><br /><br /><p><br />Three weeks later in the same area of half cut trees, I found an adult beaver lying under a fallen tree, evidently dead from the tree falling on it.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/R6vKSvlMmwI/AAAAAAAAAA4/DH0smhoE1lM/s1600-h/deadbv27dec7.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/R6vKSvlMmwI/AAAAAAAAAA4/DH0smhoE1lM/s320/deadbv27dec7.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5164443821069343490" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I've watched beavers cut trees, and when the tree shows signs of falling they quickly go back to the safety of the pond. They let the wind blow the tree down, and I am sure 99.99% of beaver cut trees fall with out hitting a beaver. In the past 30 years or so, to my knowledge, only two beavers in the 600 acres of prime beaver territory that I explore have been hit by a falling tree. Based on that previous observation of the vigilant adult and the rarity of trees falling on beavers, I have a hunch that the adult beaver that was killed, the mother, was stymied by being over protective of her kit and by her habit of staring down kits to keep them back in the channel. (In another family, I saw an adult speed through out the pond forcing kits to dive just prior to a large aspen falling some fifty yards from where the kits were.) <br /><br />Since the beaver died early in the winter, except for a few days after a thaw, the snow cover around the pond allowed me to keep track of the comings and goings of the beavers remaining in the colony. They continued to feed off the tree that killed the beaver.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/R6vPgflMmyI/AAAAAAAAABI/2Hrng-8AFhY/s1600-h/deadbv28dec7.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/R6vPgflMmyI/AAAAAAAAABI/2Hrng-8AFhY/s320/deadbv28dec7.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5164449554850683682" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Then they cut down a huge red oak closer to their lodge. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2OZIpEZUHI/AAAAAAAAQSc/-vpfhqzKzKA/s1600-h/oakstump30dec7.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 284px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2OZIpEZUHI/AAAAAAAAQSc/-vpfhqzKzKA/s400/oakstump30dec7.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432353949281243250" /></a><br /><br />Coyotes took the carcass of the dead beaver. I sometimes saw the beavers up on the ice of the pond. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2OaS7TIZHI/AAAAAAAAQSk/7Kg0wOcKnr0/s1600-h/bvsonicea30dec7.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 350px; height: 236px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/S2OaS7TIZHI/AAAAAAAAQSk/7Kg0wOcKnr0/s400/bvsonicea30dec7.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432355225485206642" /></a><br /><br />I so no signs of any beavers leaving or entering the pond. There were no kits in the pond that spring and summer, and I think one beaver left the family in the spring. Three remained and I think that next winter the patriarch of the family mated with one of his two year old daughters. Just a hunch. I had no proof. I would have to wait until the late spring to see if some kits popped out of the lodge in Shangri-la Pond. <br /><br />Then after a heavy spring shower, the pond's dam failed. The dam was about 40 feet long and five feet high. A 15 foot section of the dam was washed away, leaving only a two foot high remnant.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SfNPmbIU75I/AAAAAAAAHY0/Q8Au1aw6si0/s1600-h/shldambust5apr9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 287px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SfNPmbIU75I/AAAAAAAAHY0/Q8Au1aw6si0/s400/shldambust5apr9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5328690305645735826" /></a><br /><br />The pond disappeared. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SfNPKkPNeDI/AAAAAAAAHX0/uHYOsVjbX60/s1600-h/shl5apr9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 248px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SfNPKkPNeDI/AAAAAAAAHX0/uHYOsVjbX60/s400/shl5apr9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5328689827054188594" /></a><br /><br />The beavers repaired the dam. When I went out in the early evening I expected to see every beaver in the family hard at work, but I soon saw that's not how these beavers operate. Before repairing the main dam they built a smaller dam behind it, helping to keep the water level high around their lodge.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SfNPy3c0A-I/AAAAAAAAHZU/tmZmocQkA3c/s1600-h/shllitdam5apr9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SfNPy3c0A-I/AAAAAAAAHZU/tmZmocQkA3c/s400/shllitdam5apr9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5328690519406281698" /></a><br /><br />That small dam gave them some breathing room, and stemmed the flow of water out of the pond. So I'd see one beaver working on the main dam, another still putting mud on the back dam and another well up pond looking for greens to eat. The beaver working on the main dam would take generous breaks. I decided I wouldn't mind working with these beavers.<br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NVy5iLrcaBU?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />The restored pond was magnificent, larger than before.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SfNWRYVBiWI/AAAAAAAAHvs/qXq_hZvu9Ug/s1600-h/shl19apr9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SfNWRYVBiWI/AAAAAAAAHvs/qXq_hZvu9Ug/s400/shl19apr9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5328697640697825634" /></a><br /><br />And then a month after it was repaired, after another spring storm, the dam failed again. Here is a photo of the dam on May 1:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SgRnNs8YauI/AAAAAAAAIh0/RYvKpyN1aFc/s1600-h/shldam1may9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SgRnNs8YauI/AAAAAAAAIh0/RYvKpyN1aFc/s400/shldam1may9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5333501343813888738" /></a><br /><br />And here is how it looked on May 13:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/ShqX7AY51AI/AAAAAAAAJN8/adJIHYv6rFY/s1600-h/shla13may9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/ShqX7AY51AI/AAAAAAAAJN8/adJIHYv6rFY/s400/shla13may9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5339747348173673474" /></a><br /><br />This time an old tree trunk with a big stump was washed through the repaired end of the dam. This time 15 feet of the dam was washed away completely. I didn't discover the catastrophe until four days after it happened. By then, the beavers had abandoned the pond. I could see that they built a small back dam, but they didn't even make an effort to repair the main dam. I think the problem they faced was this: to build and repair the dam they dredged up a good bit of mud behind the dam. Usually there is an unending supply of mud behind a dam because silt always collects behind it. But twice in a month much of the accumulated silt in the pond had been washed away. <br /><br />The death of the matriarch didn't dissolve this family of beavers. Now the dam had failed and the beavers had abandoned the pond. Would I ever see them again? Meanwhile, a year earlier, one beaver had moved into the East Trail Pond below Shangri-la Pond. Then for the winter it moved into Meander Pond, just one beaver and I often saw it. My hunch was that it was one a young beaver who left the Shangri-la Pond family. Two year old beavers generally leave the family. Then in the spring before the dam failures in nearby Shangri-la Pond that lone beaver moved up to Thicket Pond.<br /><br />I expected the Shangri-la Pond beavers to move back to Thicket or Meander pond, too, especially if the Patriarch's new mate was pregnant. In slow chapters during the late spring and summer, the story unfolded. Another beaver appeared in Thicket Pond and the beaver that had been there didn't seem please. It slapped its tail at the intruder. Then I saw that interloping beaver respond by going down to Meander Pond just below. Then I stopped seeing fresh beaver cutting around Thicket Pond, just as a beaver started cutting large ironwoods on a rocky slope above Meander Pond. I often saw the beaver working. There was a burrow in a slight bank near the dam that beavers in the pond had used over the years. The beaver or beavers appeared to be staying there. Then I only saw muskrats coming out of the burrow. Then through the sprouting vegetation that all but obscures the main channel of Meander Pond, I saw a new lodge rising,<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SrGwAHbw44I/AAAAAAAAMOM/eTjNBtmduNA/s1600-h/mplodge15aug9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SrGwAHbw44I/AAAAAAAAMOM/eTjNBtmduNA/s400/mplodge15aug9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382276545726440322" /></a><br /><br />and a beaver packing logs up on it.<br /><object width="384" height="313"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/dfzhCr3H0-8&hl=en_US&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/dfzhCr3H0-8&hl=en_US&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="384" height="313" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object><br />The beavers who had moved into the pond built a new lodge on top of a very old lodge that had just about shrunk away. Now I came out as many evenings as I could looking for one thing: a beaver kit.<br /><object width="384" height="313"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rhbVsY8EOgM&hl=en_US&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rhbVsY8EOgM&hl=en_US&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="384" height="313" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object><br />When I saw it swimming gamely behind one of its parents, I knew the story had not ended, but I had story enough to amaze myself in the retelling. In two and a half years the beaver family had adapted to three major crises: the death of the matriarch, a dam failure, then another dam failure forcing them to abandon their pond. That lesson of survival, I think, pertains to the history I am trying to write. To reduce the fur trade to the killing of animals for their pelts is to miss the point of what really happened. In reality one beaver does not exist. Beavers find their existence in a family through which survival skills are taught. To be sure, the fur trade ravaged that nexus of skills. I have seen young beaver refugees from trapping season who seemed to be in shock, but how many Meander Ponds were there in North America where beaver families could find refuge?Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-66472540626903435422009-12-11T10:56:00.000-08:002010-01-06T20:18:09.518-08:00Peter Kalm and trees falling in the nightIn the standard histories, the land is always "rich in furs", then trapped out, and the trappers and traders move west to find land "rich in furs." So what are we to make of this June 29, 1750, diary entry made during a trip by canoe from Albany to Montreal along a trail that had been a major fur trading route for over one hundred years and in that area where the so-called "Beaver Wars" began in the second half of 17th century between eastern tribes vying for access to beavers far to the west because beavers in the wilderness between Albany and Montreal could not be found?<br /><br />"As we came lower down the river, the dams, which the beavers had made in it, produced new difficulties. These laborious animals had carried together all sorts of boughs and branches and placed them across the river, putting mud and clay in betwixt them to stop the water. They had bit off the ends of the branches as neatly as if they had been chopped off with a hatchet."<br /><br />At least a few beavers survived that first one hundred years of persecution.<br /><br /><a href="http://bobarnebeck.com/roaddam.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 539px; height: 368px;" src="http://bobarnebeck.com/roaddam.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />The observation was not made by a trapper, but a Swedish naturalist, a student of Linneus, sent by the Swedish Royal Academy, to find plants in North America that might be useful in Sweden. Peter Kalm did a good deal more. Not only plants fascinated him, he found a wife in Pennsylvania, and seemed to record every story he heard about the antics of snakes. He spent his first months in Pennsylvania, then the center of Swedish settlements in North America, where he saw no beavers but did see the "beaver tree," which we now call the sweet bay tree. He was told that tree was the beavers' favorite and that traps baited with limbs of the "beaver tree" never failed catching a beaver.<br /><br />He did not learn much about beavers in Pennsylvania: "Beavers were formerly abundant in New Sweden, as all the old Swedes here told me. At that time they say one dam after another raised in the rivers and brooks by beavers. But after the Europeans had come over in such great numbers and cultivated the country more, many beavers had been killed. Many, too, had just died our and some had moved further into the country, where the people were not so numerous. Therefore there is but a single place in Pennsylvania where beavers are to be seen."<br /><br />No one told him where that one place was, though some folks did assure him that beavers ate fish and could be trained to catch them. So a dozen miles or so north of Albany on his way to Montreal was where Kalm first saw what North American beavers could do. I'm inclined to think that a botanist's first exposure to the works of a beaver must be startling. I've studying beavers for 14 years and I am still startled. Look at this work on a hemlock that I saw on June 28, 2009:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sl42c8mCKmI/AAAAAAAAKuk/kEL9Vn5QU4E/s1600-h/bplhemlocks28june9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 302px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sl42c8mCKmI/AAAAAAAAKuk/kEL9Vn5QU4E/s400/bplhemlocks28june9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358780477547358818" /></a><br /><br />That he saw such fresh work on a dam, with mud and the teeth marks evidently still fresh, in late June, is interesting in itself. This was not a dam left by beavers killed long ago or during last winter's hunt. There's a special vibrancy to a dam that is being tended.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sl45sc1-e9I/AAAAAAAAK1E/f-59q_zbUg8/s1600-h/bpldama8july9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 374px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sl45sc1-e9I/AAAAAAAAK1E/f-59q_zbUg8/s400/bpldama8july9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5358784042437082066" /></a><br /><br />What a pity that Kalm didn't stay to see the beavers come to the dam. But, facing constraints in time and food, 17th and 18th travellers, even natural historians, did not tarry. Kalm didn't catalogue the trees the beavers used to make their dam, nor follow the trails beavers made on the banks of the river to see what trees they cut down. Twice in his diary he remarked about trees falling mysteriously in the night and wondered if roosting passenger pigeons or the humidity caused that. That beavers might have cut trees down never crossed his mind. Kalm hurried on to Montreal and the video clip below shows what he might have missed seeing:<br /><br /><p align="center"><font size="4"><embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-5921792675883239632&hl=en" quality="best" bgcolor="#ffffff" scale="noScale" salign="TL" FlashVars="playerMode=embedded"> </embed></font></p><br /><br />Since this was the only direct observation that Kalm had of beaver work during a journey that took him from Pennsylvania to Quebec, it could be taken as evidence of the paucity of beavers. But this leg of his journey between Albany and Lake George was the only time he confronted a semblance of wilderness. Leaving what was then called Fort St. Frederic, now called Crown Point, the southern end of Lake Champlain, Kalm recorded on October 15 that the Indians there still had an eye out for beavers: "...At this season the natives were busy hunting deer, but at the same time they took pains to see if they could discover any beaver dams, and if they found such they cut their mark into them. When a native comes to such a place and discovers that another has cut into it before him, he does not touch it nor does he go there later to shoot the beavers, but he considers it as a place that belongs to another which he is not supposed to touch."<br /><br />Farther along he skirted what were called "sunken lands," tractless swamps and marshes. If beavers were flourishing along the better traveled woods in 1750, many more probably thrived in the "sunken lands." I am not going to include a map or an aerial photograph of the terrain today, which are so readily available, because maps and aerial photographs hurry us over the land and miss the trackless point of America in 1750. Here is a photo of some sunken lands near me in September 2006.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SSzNYTGqfEI/AAAAAAAABwo/rwZoAkdrgTg/s1600-h/ws29sept.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 217px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SSzNYTGqfEI/AAAAAAAABwo/rwZoAkdrgTg/s400/ws29sept.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272815081072786498" /></a><br /><br />Kalm was well aware of the fur trade and described its importance to Albany and Montreal. He didn't see beavers in Canada, nor did he go out of his way to look for them. He wrote: "It is said that beavers and other animals, whose skins are sent to France, were formerly very numerous in the neighborhood of Montreal and the populated places in Canada. Now they have about disappeared there and it is necessary to travel far to shoot or bargain for them, and in the future it will be necessary to go farther."<br /><br />How could he resist what was repeated then and continues to be repeated over and again: the land was rich in furs, the beavers were all killed and men headed west to lands rich in furs. At least Kalm left us evidence of beavers left behind.Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-84131039837842473632009-11-27T08:08:00.000-08:002009-12-07T17:21:57.516-08:00Francis I and the lure of ItalyThe fur trade is a part of our heritage to the same degree that the calculated destruction of native Americans is a part of our heritage. Historians commonly lump the fur trade of the 16th century with the fisheries, as if the relatively meagre shipments of fur from North America were as important economically to Europeans as the tons of fish caught off the coasts and in the bays of North America and shipped back to Spain, France and Britain. Even as a luxury trade, fur amounted to very little in the 16th century simply because fur was not that important to the culture of the 16th century. <br /><br />European history and American history are generally taught separately and seldom are the timelines in each analyzed together. Yet when it finally dawned on me that 1492 is more or less in the middle of the most glittering period on the European timeline, the Renaissance, the boredom with which the French and British greeted the discovery of the Western Hemisphere became understandable. The Renaissance was a rediscovery of the Classical culture, and how much discovery could a culture bear? <br /><br />Francis was born in 1494, two years after the discovery of the New World. But the ongoing tales from the New World played no part in his education. By the time he succeeded his second cousin Louis XII, marrying Louis's hunchbacked daughter Claude, the Duchess of Brittany, to smooth the way, he was devoted to bringing the ferment of the Italian Renaissance to France. His mother Louise of Savoy admired Italian artists. Soon after gaining the throne Francis invited Leonardo Da Vinci to his court though Titian is the most notable artist to leave us his portrait.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SxAbtwVQhMI/AAAAAAAAN74/irOebsLtBG4/s1600/Titian_francis_I_of_france.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 356px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SxAbtwVQhMI/AAAAAAAAN74/irOebsLtBG4/s400/Titian_francis_I_of_france.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5408853625354093762" /></a><br /><br />Yes, the outfit Francis is wearing makes it look like he is indeed a man who appreciates fur. But Titian never saw Francis in person. One source says he based his portrait on a medallion made by Cellini, who lived with Francis for a few years, and another source speculates that Francis had one of his outfits shipped to him. As I'll explore in other posts, artists who could pull it off depicted fur to show off their skill. Unconstrained by the man in the flesh, how could Titian resist giving Francis's coat a generous fur collar? Didn't Francis live in the chilly north? There is one portrait of Francis done from life, and Clouet has the King looking like an Italian dandy.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SxEy1ZdlQvI/AAAAAAAAN8Q/ABAZt7rOVWE/s1600/francois.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 313px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SxEy1ZdlQvI/AAAAAAAAN8Q/ABAZt7rOVWE/s400/francois.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409160520398095090" /></a><br /><br />Francis's importation of Italian and Classical art won him his spurs as a Renaissance Man, and it meshed nicely, in his own mind, with the on-going obsession of French monarchs with the conquest of Italy. Italy was the portal through which the wonders of the Classical world were rediscovered. Francis did patronize the voyage of the Italian sea captain Verrazzano to the New World, but when that worthy made his landfall in America, Francis was the prisoner of Charles Fifth of Spain as a result of his attempt to conquor Milan. According to a papal nuncio who saw him during his imprisonment, Francis always wore a beige coat trimmed in inexpensive fur, which is to say, fur was not really his style.<br /><br />To be sure historian and biographers, anticipating what was to come, try to plant the seeds of European fascination with the New World as early as possible. That's a hard sell with Francis. His best recent biographer, R. J. Knecht, writes: "Unfortunately for Verrazzano, his return coincided with Bourbon's invasion of Provence. Francis had already left Blois to take charge of his army in the south. He may not have found time to read Verrazzano's report or to meet him in Lyons in August, yet the explorer was commissioned by him about this time to undertake another voyage to the Indies. He was given four ships, but just as they were about to sail, they were requisitioned to help defend the French Channel coasts." The Bourbon invasion was a ramification of the Italian wars, which inevitably touched off fighting with the ancient enemy across the Channel.<br /><br />Verrazzano, I think, understood his patron. He mentions the native animals of the New World but not to fuel trade in fur and skins. He assured the king that there would be good sport hunting animals: "There is an abundance of animals, stags, deer, hares; and also of lakes and pools of running water with various types of birds, perfect for all the delights and pleasures of the hunt.” Francis had a passion not just for the chase, but for the gore. In 1520 Richard Wingfield sent an account of one of Francis's hunts to Henry VIII, adding "then the king himself, after their fashion, cut off the right foot of said boar..." In 1539 the Bishop of Saluzzo wrote of Francis's court, "Here one thinks only of hunting... One hunts stags twice a day, sometimes more often; and with nets once, then one moves onto another lodging." The court of France was peripatetic, not the least to avoid being in Paris too long which only invited challenges to royal authority. So a huge retinue followed the King, Francis made it huger still by raising the number of huntsmen attached to his court. He also increased the size of what amounted to his harem. When he was riddled with syphlis, he had his lackies carry him on a litter so he could shoot stags. <br /><br />Francis's interest in animals didn't seem to extend beyond blood sport and into the world of fashion. The sense of animals that Francis and other nobles had was closer to Medieval Bestiaries than to Venus in Furs. Wealth required the explication of one's background and standing, which required symbolism both in heraldry and display. Francis chose the salamander, something he never "chased", and emblazoned it on his ceremonial talismans with the motto Nutrisco et extinguo, so to say, nourish the good and extinguish the bad. The salamanders in stone are all over his castle at Chambord, built originally as a hunting lodge.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sx1xPX8VdZI/AAAAAAAAOKk/GPnGTKCBZS0/s1600-h/salamandera.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sx1xPX8VdZI/AAAAAAAAOKk/GPnGTKCBZS0/s400/salamandera.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412606836108260754" /></a><br /><br />Of course, he never wore a salamander. But Queen Claude had the ermine as her emblem. In France, the ermine was probably most common in Brittany, of which Claude was duchess. So in the castle's bedrooms, the salamander of Francis was paired with the ermine of Claude. <br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sx1ypV3ku_I/AAAAAAAAOKs/7fEP5Scy_vQ/s1600-h/salermine.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sx1ypV3ku_I/AAAAAAAAOKs/7fEP5Scy_vQ/s400/salermine.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412608381739645938" /></a><br /><br />In depicting Francis artists found that salamanders seldom served. So in one mantle piece, Francis wears blue robes decorated with gold fleur-de-lys and an ermine collar. While England had the Knights of the Garter, France had the Order of the Ermine with the motto "potius mori, quam faedari" so much to say "better dead than sullied." This motto had its roots in the Classical belief that the ermine "would prefer death over the possibility dirtying its coat by crossing a marsh." Not surprisingly with that motto, the ermine became the emblem of many noble women, and women were allowed in the Order of the Ermine. The legend of the ermine has also been linked to the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary and belief in the Immaculate Conception. (Today the Order of the Ermine is a medal given to those defending Breton culture from Parisian bureaucrats. My sister-in-love, who founded the American branch of the International Committee for the Defense of the Breton Language, was awarded one several years ago.) <br /><br />Leonardo da Vinci painted a young Italian not wearing an ermine but holding a live one.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sx2fsBnAKsI/AAAAAAAAOK0/UMvFN6DpQ9g/s1600-h/davinciermine.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 294px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sx2fsBnAKsI/AAAAAAAAOK0/UMvFN6DpQ9g/s400/davinciermine.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412657905864288962" /></a><br /><br />This was not, I think, an effort on his part to correct myth by depicting nature. Leonardo loved Bestiaries. In his own he wrote: "MODERATION The ermine our of moderation never eats but once a day, and it would rather let itself be captured by hunters than take refuge in a dirty lair, in order not to stain its purity." Here is a thought likely to placate any beauty squeamish about having an animal sacrificed for her wardrobe.<br /><br />Francis seemed to have no interest in Beastiaries, and if he was in the Order of the Ermine, there's no evidence that it meant anything to him. He certainly didn't hunt ermine as easy as Leonardo made that enterprise out to be. Because of the interest of the nobility, the ermine was highly prized, much more valuable than beaver pelts. It rivalled the Russian sable and indeed ermines imported into France came from the northeast, not the New World.<br /><br />Ten years ago, from the day I am writing this, I took advantage of an early winter thaw to see if beavers would be out in what I called Beaver Point Pond to take advatage of the warmth. As I walked up to the dam of Otter Hole Pond which spread out above Beaver Point Pond, I saw an ermine only because it was so conspicuous since all the snow had melted. In the video I took at the 15th and 30th second there are two brief glimpses of the white dashing ermine running through the tumble of logs and sticks below the dam.<br /><br /><object width="384" height="313"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DxMUr8GTzjQ&hl=en_US&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DxMUr8GTzjQ&hl=en_US&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="384" height="313" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object><br /><br />How stange those Medieval and Renaissance conceits about the ermine seem. How easy to see in that video that in its own habitat the ermine would never be sullied. It might not be so lucky when its pelt adorned the ladies of Francis's courts.<br /><br />By virtue of being King, Francis sponsored all the sporadic efforts to explore the New World undertaken during his reign. Verrazzano disappeared on subsequent voyages, supposed eaten by cannibals. Jacques Cartier, a Breton sailor, inspired by the reports of fishermen, organized voyages to explore the land mass just west of those fertile fishing grounds.<br /><br /> (to be continued)Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-80830322047509815832009-11-10T05:00:00.000-08:002011-04-28T19:07:59.718-07:00My Mother's Mink Jacket<div>I asked my brother who is seven years older than me, if he recalled when our mother got her mink, and when she first began talking about wanting a mink coat. "I didn't know she had one," was all I got out of my effort to corroborate memories. So what does my remembering mean? Killing animals, skinning them and wrapping their fur around your body is not a primal urge. If it were, my brother would have remembered. Wanting a mink coat is a desire constructed by civilization and everyone involved in the fur trade then and now consciously confronted the necessity of killing animals in order to attain the comforts or benefits of fur. Everyone had a mother or mothering influence in their early life. But it seems seeing ones mother wrap the remains of a dead animal around her body makes an impression only on some children.<br /><br />Granted, I am thinking about my first impression of fur a bit too much of late. Indeed, for years I didn't associate the song I sang to my mother, My Skin Your Skin, just those words repeated in sweet falsetto until told to stop, with her desire for a mink. I thought it expressed my desire for her skin. But if words mean anything, the song clearly expresses a separation between her skin and mine. But why do I think now that, when I was four or five years old, my drawing a distinction between her skin and my skin had anything to do with her desire for a mink?<br /><br />My mother‘s four year career as a professional night club and radio singer in Washington, DC, which included glossy publicity photos,<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sw2U3sBhMMI/AAAAAAAAN7w/Y0tNnblXCCI/s1600/mother.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 300px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5408142411973079234" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Sw2U3sBhMMI/AAAAAAAAN7w/Y0tNnblXCCI/s400/mother.JPG" /></a><br /><br />ended in 1934 after she didn’t make it in New York City. She married a handsome federal government bureaucrat and their third son, me, was born in 1947. She tried to keep her old showbiz dreams alive with song writing, and sending her songs to old show biz contacts. Julius LaRosa sang my mother’s song, “Spring Again,” on the Arthur Godfrey television show. In the 30's she sang frequently on Godfrey's radio show when it came out of Washington. A New York music publisher offered her $10,000 for "Spring Again." (Here's a link to her singing the song from a record she produced, and paid for, at a local recording studio <a href="http://bobarnebeck.com/SpringAgain.wma">Spring Again</a>)<br /><br />Much depended on Spring Again. I think it was then that she expressed her pent up desires to have a house, a Cadillac, and a mink coat. I easily grasped her first yearning. There was a steady progression of tenants from the Falkland Apartments to new houses in suburbs farther away from the city. (Falkland was right on the "District Line," the boundary between the District of Columbia and Maryland.) I lost friends because of that progression. Frankly, given all the Fords, Chevies and Plymouths I counted, I thought a Cadillac impossible, and hoped at most for a Buick.<br /><br />But why did I take her desire for a mink coat so personally? There was no pleasure in it for me. I'm sure my two older brothers told me how mink coats were made. Did I become jealous of a mink coat, or fascinated by it? It was clear to us all that she wanted the mink for the glamour. Thanks to her nightclub career she was no stranger to glamour, and judging from the movies of the period, fur was a mainstay of female showing off in the 30's and remained so in the 50's. However, she always told me she wanted it for the warmth.<br /><br />My mother did not sell her song. Another recently published song used the phrase "Spring again." But my father's career went well. We moved to a new house in late 1954 and we got a used 1954 Cadillac (rounded fins) in the summer of 1957. Between those two dreams-come-true, my mother got her mink, not a coat, but a mink jacket, which she always called a "stoll."<br /><br />The photo below shows that she had her jacket prior to January 1957 and it is most likely that she got it for Christmas 1956.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SvlkqwEL9-I/AAAAAAAANfA/K34-ielRaPM/s1600-h/minkjacket.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 362px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5402459913627367394" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SvlkqwEL9-I/AAAAAAAANfA/K34-ielRaPM/s400/minkjacket.JPG" /></a><br /><br />She was flanked by her sons. I am the smallest, 9 years old, my brothers 16 and 12. I recall seeing a series of photos of her posing with her mink alone, but another photo is more suggestive. Below my mother in her mink posed with her second son, then 17 years old and me, 14.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SvlkrDXi1WI/AAAAAAAANfI/s-mjO4UhXZQ/s1600-h/minkjacketA.JPG"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 391px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5402459918808831330" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SvlkrDXi1WI/AAAAAAAANfI/s-mjO4UhXZQ/s400/minkjacketA.JPG" /></a><br /><br />Much happened to me in that 5 years, can't you see it in my face? More or less the same that happens to every boy between the ages of 9 to 15, though my rite of passage was far different than my brother's. He had girlfriends throughout puberty and more pursuing him. I had none and suffered through every date I had, though not as much as the poor girl stuck with me. As the photos show, my brother gravitated to that mink and mother wanted him next to her in her moments of glamour. Easy to see why. I haven't asked that brother about his memories of the mink jacket (he may still have it in storage,) but I remember that one Halloween he dressed up as a woman. He must have been about 13, and was stunning. There was a family discussion about whether he should wear the mink. I don't think my mother was amused, and, as I recall, he didn't. Perhaps I do not make much of an impression in the photo above, but by that time I had worn the mink, several times.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Thanks to my disinclination to go out on dates, it was not uncommon for me to be alone in the house on Saturday night. On dark winter nights I would go into our backyard naked except for my mother's mink jacket. I told myself that I was testing to see if my mother's claims about its warmth were true. I fancied myself a scientist. Well, not warm enough to keep me from soon going back inside.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>I've thought about this a great deal, and I don't think that my suburban romps foreshadowed the warmth I felt on those rare days some 40 years later, when I saw a mink go about its business on the snow and ice of Wellesley Island swamps. Warmth comes from motion, not posing, at least if you follow the mink. Tracking an animal in the snow, the last thing you want is to be burdened by fur.<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/D0_LPvl7hS0&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/D0_LPvl7hS0&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />And I'm not sure the mink jacket warmed my mother. Winters were always cold to her but the mink was banished even before my parents moved to Florida. I'm not sure exactly why but while she continued to love her house, and Cadillacs, she stopped wearing the mink jacket. My father was from Minnesota, the son of a Scandinavian family which, if old photos can be believed, had an entirely different sense of fur. To them it was an accessory, well, more than that, a punctuation to fashion, not an attempt at enveloping glamour.</div><br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SwWwunpma8I/AAAAAAAANtw/5JnEqRpgvP4/s1600/stole.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 284px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5405921242692086722" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SwWwunpma8I/AAAAAAAANtw/5JnEqRpgvP4/s400/stole.jpg" /></a><br /><br />The photo is of one of my grandmother's cousins. I never saw my grandmother with such a wrap. My father's parents were never rich and even had to ship him, the youngest of three, off to live with an aunt in Oklahoma City during the Depression. When that aunt died in the 1980's she bequeathed all her belongings to her favorite nephew, my father. Among the items were two small furs, weasels, heads and tails. (I found them in our house on Wellesley Island, and sent them to my two brothers as a joke.)<br /><br />I have no reason to believe that my father had anything against my mother's mink jacket. But even a hint from him could crush her. Did he mention his aunt's furs? Did my mother finally see the heads of the animals she was wearing? All I know is that she stopped wearing her mink.Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-52434079699282843312009-11-09T10:26:00.000-08:002009-11-09T10:31:30.486-08:00Introduction part twoIn his 1832 book Astoria, about John Jacob Astor’s 1811 attempt to extend his fur trading activities to the Oregon coast, Washington Irving described the reaction of Indians along the Columbia River to the arrival of white fur traders: “The Indians were overjoyed when they found this band of white men intended to return and trade with them. They promised to use all diligence in collecting quantities of beaver skins, and no doubt proceeded to make deadly war upon that sagacious, but ill-fated animal, who, in general, lived in peaceful insignificance among his Indian neighbors, before the intrusion of the white trader." <br /><br />I like Irving’s observation not only because I think it is accurate but because that’s exactly what I want to show. How the beaver’s sagacity enables it to live in peaceful insignificance, and that what most historians, ecologists and anthropologists think beavers signify is wrong. Beavers don’t mean what those experts say, in part because of the way beavers actually are, which I will try to describe, and in part because ecology, anthropology and history focus on exploit, and the significance of those things that are exploited is too often blown out of proportion in an effort to justify the exploitation. Humans always want to save face, and too often legitimize past slaughter by making its continuance a part of hallowed tradition. I want to free the beaver from its reputation as being a measure of wealth and a reason for war. Millions of beavers were killed for no legitimate reason. <br /><br />Rather than describe the march of civilization across the continent endlessly repeating that the land was “rich with furs,” and implying that killing the animals bearing those furs was inevitable and necessary for progress, and that the men responsible were larger than life, I will highlight dissonant voices. In his April 8, 1859, journal entry Thoreau summoned up the sorry record of the trade: “What a pitiful business is the fur trade, which has been pursued now for so many ages, for so many years by famous companies which enjoy a profitable monopoly and control a large portion of the earth’s surface, unweariedly pursuing and ferreting out small animals by the aid of all the loafing class tempted by rum and money….” What prompted Thoreau’s observation was a newspaper report on the sudden demand for skunk furs in Russia, engineered by the Hudson’s Bay Company when there was a drop in demand for beavers. The Journal of Commerce reported a “’mania for capturing these animals [which] seems to have equaled the Western Pike’s Peak gold excitement, men, women, and children turning out en masse for that purpose.’” <br /><br />American historians do not like to be presented with evidence suggesting that Americans were maniacs. Surely beavers must have regarded them as such. <br />There is a tradition of debunking in American history, though it seems to be currently out of fashion, but maybe my take on the fur trade will pass muster as history. <br /><br />I’m not so sure anthropologists will appreciate a re-examination of their take on the Indians’ relationship to beavers, because the Indians were surely as maniacal as the Europeans. Having spent too much time in beaver swamps, I find myself getting strange feelings sometimes. When I look at the early pottery of Indians found not far from where I live, pottery made 500 years before the fur trade started, I see decoration around the pot rims that looks like the marks beaver incisors often leave on the wood of trees after they stripped the bark away. Anthropologists call such decoration “dentition.” And when I first saw the Indian mounds in Newark, Ohio, I felt like I had found the land of Giant Beavers. But no one else seems to get this sense of Indians living in peaceful significance with beavers.<br /><br />In my opinion, thanks to the popularization of the work of anthropologists, we too often impose a world view on all Indians that is a composite of the most exploitive traits of many disparate tribes. Yes, some tribes sent teenage boys out to fast until they had visions of their totem animal who they would then go out a kill and then keep the skin for luck in all subsequent hunts and wars. But the Iroquois and Huron didn’t have that tradition. Yet the argument is still made and widely accepted by non-Indians that they have some mystical right to kill beavers and other animals at their whim. <br /><br />Keen to categorize Indian exploits, anthropologists seem loath to let any animal live “in peaceful insignificance with their Indian neighbor,“ but 150 years ago they had a different take. The “father of American anthropology“, Henry Lewis Morgan, who died in 1881, wrote the first, and in many ways still the best, book on beavers in 1868. In 1851 he had written the first “scientific” account of Indian culture, a still well respected book on the Iroquois. A lawyer in Rochester, New York, Morgan was a champion for Indian rights and was made a member of the Seneca tribe. Then the Ojibwa shared their lore about beavers with Morgan when he was doing legal work for a railroad in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. But all that he learned from the Indians did not prompt him to find much significance in the ancient relationship between Indians and beavers. In his beaver book he wrote: “During the aboriginal period, this animal was of no use except for his flesh, which was not of much request; and the Indians had no method of taking him except by the bow and arrow.” Today, thanks, I think, in large measure to the reconstruction and elaboration of Indian mythology by white anthropologists, a bite of beaver, killed by one of Sewell Newhouse’s steel traps, is a must at many an Indian powwow.<br /><br />So I propose oppose the sagacity of the resourceful beavers to the maniacal human lust to kill, which will not bring millions of beavers and the world they created back to life, but I at least hope to persuade you that we should not let myth making and pandering to manufactured heroes obscure the true relationship of humans with beavers in North America. But who am to slap my tail so? What right do I have to defend beavers, what qualifications to even describe them? I have no credentials in any academic discipline, and having never killed a beaver nor any other wild animal, how dare I evaluate the actions and motives of the men, both European and Indian, who did? Yes, for many years, I found their ponds, sat still and tried to learn from the beavers, but why not relegate the musings of those loafing hours to a few poems?<br /><br />I’m not sure when it struck me. My life had worked itself into a pattern of walking down wooded ridges and seeing the continuity and surprises in and around the yawning womb that is a beaver pond. I’d read the white of twigs stripped of their bark, try to catch echoes of the crash of tall trees around the pond, and freeze in anticipation watching the mounded lodge, womb within a womb, and wait for the brown wedge head of the beaver to cut the still pond surface into resounding ripples, if not crescendo slap tails. It struck me, I’m not sure when, that those who made their business off the beaver came to its fur or the beavers’ world within a world of their own wound within their own skin. How different were those worlds from mine and the sense the beavers have of their own world?Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6924365272739958359.post-9687470787836448192009-08-17T10:57:00.000-07:002012-11-04T07:13:10.840-08:00Introduction<div align="center">My Skin, Your Skin</div><div align="center">A History of the Fur Trade as Informed</div><div align="center">by Observations of Beavers</div><div align="center">on and around Wellesly Island, New York</div><div align="center">by Bob Arnebeck</div><div align="left"><br />“I sit here at my window like a priest of Isis, and observe the phenomena of three thousand years ago, yet unimpaired.” So Thoreau boasted at the beginning of his Journals. I revel in Thoreau’s timelessness, though not when he’s at his window showing off his Harvard education. I follow him more closely when he’s out in Concord’s swamps and woods, where the seasons not the ages rule. I hope his narrative of an August day in 1854 describing goldenrods and bees is much like what I write about them in my journal over 150 years later.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Ss3n-NbdWRI/AAAAAAAAM60/fQKpsOUMa1k/s1600-h/beegrod28aug8.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 265px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Ss3n-NbdWRI/AAAAAAAAM60/fQKpsOUMa1k/s400/beegrod28aug8.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5390219384975087890" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Of course, thanks to the fur trade, Thoreau never saw a beaver. History can be brutal to the timeless.<br /><br />My study of beavers is a portal into any time, save the fur trading centuries. Perhaps I should be content with that, a recapitulation of beaver life before the slaughter began. I’ve seen colonies progress up and down creek valleys more or less unmolested. (I see evidence of coyotes taking individual beavers now and then.) Yet I think I am learning something important about beavers that suggests how they survived the fur trade, maybe not around Thoreau‘s Concord but perhaps where I am just a few hundred miles to the west in Jefferson County, New York. I can describe that only if I give the beavers I saw, not the aura of timelessness, but a detailed history to demonstrate their genius for survival. Then I must make that slice of history compelling enough to inform a larger history of the 400 year hunt bent on killing and skinning beavers in every watershed in North America primarily to make felt for hats in Europe, so that I can suggest that, against incredible odds, beavers fashioned their own survival.<br /><br />This is a risky assertion because no animal advertises its presence more than beavers that build dams,<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Ss3o3kec69I/AAAAAAAAM68/6ADul4o8T3o/s1600-h/shldam19apr9.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 382px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Ss3o3kec69I/AAAAAAAAM68/6ADul4o8T3o/s400/shldam19apr9.jpg" alt="" id="" /></a><br /><br />create ponds with lodges large enough to loom over the pond-scape,<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Ss3sZ_2sieI/AAAAAAAAM7E/jjU1-Fme4tE/s1600-h/lsdam30dec8.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 261px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Ss3sZ_2sieI/AAAAAAAAM7E/jjU1-Fme4tE/s400/lsdam30dec8.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5390224260414081506" /></a><br /><br />and cut trees many times larger than themselves. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Ss3ucAvJ_FI/AAAAAAAAM7M/nDnDgDRyaQA/s1600-h/poplardowna16july9.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/Ss3ucAvJ_FI/AAAAAAAAM7M/nDnDgDRyaQA/s400/poplardowna16july9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5390226494033886290" /></a><br /><br />Beavers are easy to find, and to kill. In the latest monograph on the beaver, there is no suggestion that beavers had any survival skills that could thwart the fur trade. Indeed they died too easily. “The beaver trade declined rapidly when the stocks dwindled rapidly” Muller-Schwarze and Sun write, “after Sewell Newhouse invented the efficient steel trap in Oneida, New York, in 1823.“<br /><br />The authors credit the beavers’ survival to the conservation movement. In New York’s Adirondack Mountains in 1900 there were said to be only fifteen beavers. In 1904, the state conservation agency released six Canadian beavers, and then a year later fourteen beavers from Yellowstone National Park, and eleven beavers were released elsewhere in the state. If that’s true then all beavers in New York State today are relatively close cousins, but I bet beavers survived the fur trade in the swamps near where I live. I’m going out on limb in saying that. An analysis of variations in the mitochondrial DNA of New York beavers might determine how severe the population bottleneck was in 1900, and how closely the beavers I see in Jefferson County now are related to beavers in Yellowstone.<br /><br />But why shouldn’t I credit the conservation movement for saving beavers? I abhor killing wild animals and the conservation regime limits their destruction and protects their habitat. But that same movement ensconced in the state bureaucracy continues to manage beaver populations by promoting the trapping of beavers for recreation, heritage, extra income, and the fashion industry. The state’s conservation biologists have always had ready estimates of the beaver population to justify trapping. Twenty years after they “restored” beavers, trapping resumed. Now beavers are considered a nuisance and where I live the trapping season is as long as the market will bear, October 20 to March 30. Only the thicker, darker winter fur is marketable. That said, you can get a permit from the state and clear your land of beavers by any means at any time.<br /><br />Conservation biologist count animals and protect their habitat only to sustain human exploitation of animals. In a pond I own close to a heavily trapped swamp, I observe refugees of the slaughter by ones and twos. They often appear catatonic and disoriented. In the spring of 2001, one slept on the bank of the pond for months like an earthquake victim afraid of an aftershock, not snug inside a burrow where it belongs. Earlier that year, walking on the winter ice of the swamp, I may have seen its last home, a large lodge.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SvAnSl76mqI/AAAAAAAANeQ/APJIQesYF-E/s1600-h/wslodge10afeb.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SvAnSl76mqI/AAAAAAAANeQ/APJIQesYF-E/s400/wslodge10afeb.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399859153591769762" /></a><br /><br />surrounded by three steel traps dangling underwater from sticks frozen in the ice.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SvAnTA04VII/AAAAAAAANeY/4_MpVGPhQsI/s1600-h/trap10feb.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 292px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t8BRe_gEVWo/SvAnTA04VII/AAAAAAAANeY/4_MpVGPhQsI/s400/trap10feb.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399859160810017922" /></a><br /><br />Of course, when I attack conservation management, I echo those trappers and hunters who insist that game does not have to be managed because the Lord will always provide them with sport. I don‘t want to support that belief by suggesting the beavers’ invincibility. But I think that the only way to bring about an absolute taboo against trapping beavers, and other fur bearers, is to reveal the community and family life of the animals, and their special relationship to the land. That in turn will help sanctify their habitat for their purposes, not ours. Many animals have a mystique to humans because of their size or beauty. I give you the resourcefulness of beavers against incredible odds.<br /><br />Not that beavers are vermin. Vermin can enrage us with their resourcefulness. Beavers are too big to be compared to a roach or rat, and they don’t run and hide when confronted. The nobility of its character has been slapped into my psyche by the beavers’ magnificent tail.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bobarnebeck.com/splash3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://bobarnebeck.com/splash3.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />The accepted wisdom is that when a threat appears, a beaver slaps the water with its tail as an alarm and other beavers take heed, and all the beavers seek the safety of their lodge. There is a scientific study showing that after 382 tail slaps by adult beavers, the response to 240 of those slaps was for the other beavers in the pond to hide. And isn’t that image of the cowering beaver bolstered by the romance of the fur trade? How could beavers not flee when faced with “Mountain Men” as they are hailed as in America, or “Caesars of the Wilderness” as they are laureled in Canada?<br /><br />I haven’t counted the number of times I’ve seen a beaver slap the water with its tail, but to me it is clear that they are trying to scare me off, alarm me, not warn other beavers.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Ml_K1cNd2kg?rel=0" frameborder="0"
allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /> In 2008, in a large, open, man-made pond, enhanced by the beavers building up a low embankment, a beaver customarily slapped its tail at me every evening that I happened by. Often there was another beaver in the pond. That beaver seldom slapped its tail but it often looked over at me to see how I reacted to the tail slap just as I looked at it to see how it reacted. At first neither of us would react. But I always flinched first and walked away. The slapping beaver had warded off a perceived threat and defended its realm. I hope to the admiration of the beaver watching.<br /><br />I always seem be around that 38% of the time when the scientist sees the suppose tail slap alarm unheeded, which bodes ill for this book. Science is comfortable with the averages it creates, but I can’t make the points I want to make with average beavers, only with the real ones I see. Still, despite my years of observing, to many my lack of scientific credentials diminishes, if not negates, the value of my observations, especially when I attribute untoward sagacity to the beavers.<br /><br />At 5:11 pm on July 11, 2008, a yearling beaver sensed that I endangered the colony in a small, secluded pool lined with ferns and well shaded in a valley of hemlocks, maple, birch and elm. When it sensed me it jumped off a mound of grass where it was eating the leaves of a bush and swam back down a narrow channel to an adult near the lodge. I heard humming briefly. Then the yearling swam back up the channel by me and up and over a dam half fashioned with pine logs left by a farmer getting lumber over a decade ago. There was a smaller pool of water behind the dam where earlier another beaver had gone, swimming by me unaware of my presence. Shortly both beavers swam back down the narrow channel in front of me. The beaver sent to rescue the other was intercepted by the adult beaver by the lodge. The beaver that hadn’t noticed me evidently returned to the lower part of the pond using another channel that allowed it to avoid the adult beaver. There were no tail slaps. You might have to view the video below a couple of times to get a sense of what is going on. I love it because it shows the the beavers' sensitivity to their environment and the welfare of their family. <br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7uGe0OiKkow&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7uGe0OiKkow&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />(to be continued) </div>Bob Arnebeckhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15893961792819124892noreply@blogger.com0