Shaggycoat: The Biography of a Beaver Read online

  A FOURFOOTED AMERICAN

  INTRODUCTORY

  Just how long the red man, in company with his wild brothers, the deer,the bear, the wolf, the buffalo, and the beaver had inhabited thecontinent of North America, before the white man came, is a problem forspeculation; but judging from all signs it was a very long time. TheMound Builders of Ohio and the temple builders of Mexico speak to us outof a dim prehistoric past, but the song and story of the red man andmany a quaint Indian tradition tell us how he lived, and something ofhis life and religion.

  If we look carefully into these quaint tales and folk-lore of the redman, we shall find that he lived upon very intimate relations with allhis wild brothers and while he hunted them for meat and used theirskins for garments and their hides for bowstrings, yet he knew andunderstood them and treated them with a reverence that his white brotherhas never been able to feel.

  Before the red man bent the bow he sought pardon from the deer or bearfor the act that he was about to commit. Often when he had slain thewild creature, he made offerings to its departed spirit, and also woreits likeness tattooed upon his skin as a totem. Thus we see that thesedenizens of the wilderness were creatures of importance, playing theirpart in the life of the red man, even before the white man came to theseshores. But that they should have continued to play a prominent partafter the advent of the white man is still more vital to us.

  It was principally for beaver skins that the Hudson Bay Company unfurledits ensign over the wilds of Labrador and upon the bleak shores ofHudson Bay, during the seventeenth century. H. B. C. was the monogramupon their flag. Their coat of arms had a beaver in each quarter of theshield, and their motto was _Pro Pelle Cutem_, meaning skin for skin. Anofficial of the company once interpreted the H. B. C. as "here beforeChrist," saying that the company was ahead of the missionaries with itsemblem of civilization.

  For more than two hundred and twenty-five years this company has heldsway over a country larger than all the kingdoms of Europe, counting outRussia. For the first one hundred years it was the only government andheld power of life and death over all living in its jurisdiction.

  It was because the Indian knew that he could get so many knives or somuch cloth for a beaver skin, that he endured the terrible cold of theArctic winter, and hunted and trapped close to the sweep of the ArcticCircle. For this valuable skin white trappers built their camp-fire andslept upon ten feet of snow. It was a common day's work for a trapper todrag his snow-shoes over twenty miles of frozen waste to visit histraps.

  For the pelts of the beaver, otter and mink, those bloody battles werefought between the Hudson Bay Company men and the trappers of theNorthwest Company. The right to trap in disputed territory was held bythe rifle, and human life was not worth one beaver skin.

  In those old days, so full of hardship and peril, the beaver skin wasthe standard of value in all the Hudson Bay Company's transactions. Tenmuskrat skins, or two mink skins made a beaver skin, and the beaver skinbought the trapper his food and blanket.

  The first year of its existence the Hudson Bay Company paid seventy-fiveper cent. upon all its investments, and for over two centuries it hasbeen rolling up wealth, while to-day it is pushing further and furthernorth and is more prosperous than ever, and all this at the expense ofthe beaver and his warm-coated fellows.

  Even the civilization of Manhattan comprising what is now New York andBrooklyn was founded upon the beaver skin. It was a common thing in thedays of Wouter Van Twiller, for the colony of the Hudson to send home tothe Netherlands eighty thousand beaver skins a year.

  John Jacob Astor, the head of the rich New York family laid thefoundations for his colossal wealth in beaver skins, and this is thehistory of the frontier in nearly all parts of the country.

  But there were other ways in which the beaver was advancing the whiteman's civilization and making his pathway smooth, even before he came todestroy his four-footed friend, for the beaver was the first woodsmanto fell the forest and clear broad acres of land that were afterwardused for tillage. He also was the first engineer to dam the streams andrivers. To-day almost anywhere in New England you can see traces of hisindustry. You may not recognize it, but it is there.

  Nearly all the small meadows along our streams were made by the beaversand acres of the best tillage that New England contains were cleared bythem.

  They dammed the stream to protect their communities from their enemies,and flowed large sections of territory. All the timber upon the floodeddistrict soon rotted and fell into the lake and in this way greatsections were cleared.

  Each spring the freshets brought down mud and deposited it in the bottomof the lake until it was rich with rotting vegetable matter and decayingwood. Then the trapper came and caught the beaver, so that the dam fellinto disuse. Finally it was swept away entirely, and a broad fertilemeadow was left where there had been a woodland lake. Thus the beaverhas made meadowland for us all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific,and we have shoved him further and further from his native haunts.

  To-day he has entirely disappeared from New England, with the exceptionof a few scattered colonies in Maine, where he is protected by hisneighbors who have become interested in his ways. There is also aprotected colony in Northern New York, and a few scattered beavers inthe mountains of Virginia, but this industrious prehistoric American haslargely disappeared from the United States, east of the Rocky Mountains.His home, if he now has any in the land he once possessed, is inMontana, where he lives in something of his old abandon. There he stillmakes new meadow lands for the cattle men and rears his conical house inhis forest lake.

  Like the red man he has been thrust further and further into the wild;retreating before the shriek of the locomotive, and those ever advancingsteel rails. But the debt that we owe the beaver will remain as long aswe cut grass upon our meadow land, or appropriate the coat of this sleekAmerican for our own.

  Thus the blazed trail is pushed on and on into the wilderness and theold is succeeded by the new. Animals, birds, and trees disappear, andbrick blocks and telephone poles take their places.

  Though he will ultimately disappear from the continent, we shall alwaysbe heavily in debt to the beaver for the important part that he playedin the colonial history of America.

  Like the red man he is a true American, for he was here beforeColumbus, and his pelt was the prize for which the wilderness wasscoured. His only disqualification for citizenship in our great andgrowing country is that he is a four-footed American, while we, hismasters, are bipeds.