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The Beaver Trade Let us now turn to still another region, the Northeastern U.S., at yet another point in time - the rise of the historic fur trade and the coming of the Whites. When their ships first touched the shores of New England and the Maritimes, Europeans set foot on the edge of a forested wilderness which stretched away to the north and west for unknown leagues. As they pushed up the rivers which drained this terra incognito and traversed unnamed ponds and streams all the way to the Great Lakes and beyond, they found waterways swarming with beaver. The Indians long had hunted and trapped the beaver: hafted incisors of Castor canadensis, used as cutting and engraving tools, are often found in aboriginal middens in the Northeast. But any ecological insight the Indians had into the role of the beaver or his place in the scheme of things went by the boards when the Whites began to trade for beaver pelts.15 The fashion dictates of London and Paris may have been the stimulus for the beaver trade; but the Indian was its agent of execution. Couriers de bois, White trappers, explorers, renegades, Hudson's Bay men, Metis - all became involved in a network of chicanery and intrigue that would finally erupt in war between those ancient adversaries, France and England. And the beaver, hotly pursued by the Woodland Indians, paid for these excesses with near-extinction. Nathaniel Hale describes the way the Indian embraced the notion of stepped-up killing of the beaver: The Indians of
French Canada fell in readily with the white man's breathless pursuit of
the beaver. They, themselves, had long since learned the warmth and
durability of his pelt. They used his sharp teeth to point their
cutting and scraping tools. They ate his flesh, the tail of the
beaver being considered a special delicacy. Now they could trade his
pelt and his castors for many wonderful things they thought they needed --
ironware, clothing, guns and brandy. It was not difficult to
persuade them to step up their war on the challenging little animal that
acted like a man. This soon changed
the Indians' mode of life, making him more and more dependent on the white
man's wares. Eventually it brought about the red man's destruction.
16 [Italics mine] An earlier student of the beaver trade, Innis, has this to contribute to the discussion: The significance of
the habitat of the beaver in the development of the fur trade may be
suggested. Since the beaver was an amphibious animal, its fur was
thick and abundant and it could be hunted in summer, although the fur was
then much less valuable. The length of time required to arrive at
maturity was an important factor in the destruction of the supply of fur
and its non-migratory tendencies and elaborate housing facilities made
destruction certain. In the language of the economists, the heavy
fixed capital of the beaver became a serious handicap with the improved
technique of Indian hunting methods, incidental to the borrowing of iron
from the Europeans. Depreciation through obsolence of the beaver's
defense equipment was so rapid as to involve the immediate and complete
destruction of the animal.17 In Innis' volume, David Thompson described the result of this: Formerly the beavers
were very numerous, the many lakes and rivers gave them ample space, and
the poor Indian had then only a stick shaped and hardened in the fire, a
stone hatchet, spear and arrow heads of the same; thus armed he was weak
against the sagacious beaver who on the banks of a lake made itself a
house of a foot thick or more; composed of earth and small flat stones,
crossed and bound together with pieces of wood upon which no impression
could be made but by fire. But when the arrival of the white people
had changed all their weapons from stone to iron and steel and added the
gun every animal fell before the Indian.... The beaver became a desirable
animal for food and clothing and the fur a valuable article of trade; and
as the beaver is a stationary animal it could be attacked at any
convenient time in all seasons and thus their numbers soon became
reduced. For the furrs [sic] which the Natives traded, they
procurred from the French, Axes, Chissels [sic], Knives, Spears and other
articles of iron, with which they made good hunts of furr-bearing [sic]
animals and procurred woolen clothing. Thus armed the houses of the
Beavers were pierced through, the Dams cut through and the water of the
Ponds lowered, or wholly run off, and the houses of the Beaver and their
Burrows laid dry, by which means they became an easy prey to the
Hunter.18 If the Red Man was thus brother to the beaver, then the beaver certainly needed no enemies! The Indian hardly can have been acting in his own, or the beaver's, best ecological interests when he pursued him to near-extinction over a third of a continent. The Land of Plenty The Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Nootka, and others of the Northwest Coast who practiced the Potlatch, brought destruction of wealth to an art form. Though the destruction was largely of manmade real goods (art, weapons, clothing) at times it included food and material resources and may not be all that removed from wanton destruction of natural resources. In its purest form the Potlatch was conspicuous consumption, likened to deviant aspects of our own capitalism - a difference being that in capitalism, one tries to amass and hold on to the world's goods, whereas in the Potlatch, he tries to amass, then destroy as much wealth as possible. ... The host might
have oil poured on the fire, ostensibly to "warm" his guests, but in
reality enhancing his own prestige by forcing them to move back from the
increased heat of the fire. In the vengeance or competitive
potlatch, an opponent was challenged to meet and property was destroyed,
item by item. Blankets in great quantity were torn up and burned,
coppers were broken and destroyed, with the result that thousands of
dollars, again in post-contact terms, went up in smoke. The loser of
course was the rival who ran out of property first.19
Again, Chiefs also rivaled
one another in destroying property. At a formal feast to which a rival was
invited, a chief might burn blankets, destroy a canoe, kill a slave, or
break a copper. If the rival was not able to destroy quickly an
equal or greater amount of property, his name was "broken," his prestige
lost. 20 By the light of burning cedar masks, boxes, totems, carved war canoes, bundled candlefish whose oil fed the flames, stored venison, provender of all sorts -- and, in moments of intense competition, human slaves who were committed to the flames - the old Potlatch chiefs vied with one another to see who could be bankrupt the fastest, thereby winning the plaudits of the observers. It is said that when all portable wealth had been consumed in the Potlatch fires, some chiefs then tried to outdo each other in seeing who could sit closest to the flames - an early version perhaps of the "chicken" game among our own sub-adults. His guests at all
costs had to remain where they were or admit defeat. The black bear
blanket of Throw Away was scorched, and below his blanket the skin of his
legs was blistered, but he held his ground. Only when the blaze had
begun to die down, he arose as if nothing had happened and ate of the
feast in order to show his complete indifference to the extravagance of
his rival. 21 Granted, the Potlatch was a culture norm evolved through generations and with complex meanings. Perhaps it is significant, however, that it arose among people who lived in a land of natural plenty, for the ancient Pacific Northwest was such a place. Climate was temperate, rivers ran with salmon and the oulachon or candlefish. In the offshore waters halibut and shellfish were there for the taking. Edible berries abounded in the wet mountain valleys, and everywhere grew the great, soft, easily-felled coast cedars which gave house and fabric (Chilkat blankets), bowl, carved totem, and crest to the inhabitants. Redmen evolved a culture of conspicuous waste, with no help from Whites or others. Perhaps there is something in a perceived natural abundance that brings out the worst in ecological practices among men. The Moral We have reviewed several instances, scattered in time and space, of what only can be fairly called ecologically insensitive practices by various American Indians. Hopefully, these instances give pause to those who uncritically subscribe to a view that Indians are in some kind of natural harmony with the workings of Nature. The same thing may be said about any race, and about pre-scientific, pre-literate peoples anywhere - including the progenitors of our later "scientific" cultures. With Pogo, perhaps, all of us should join - Red and White, and Black and Yellow, the world around, agreeing to agree on one thing: "We have met the enemy and he is us!" Conservation and rational ecological practices never were strong points of our species. However, at last, perhaps, we have gained some insight into the error of our ways and the ways of our collective ancestors. For this, we should give thanks and go forth to save the land, its plants, its animals, its air, and its water for all generations of men to come. Notes 1.This emerges in many popular Indian writers: Dee
Brown, Vine DeLoria, and others. It is obvious in the antics of "Red
Power" groups, Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando, etc. Another aspect is the
uncritical attitudes of the young and others who endorse Indian "organic"
foods, supposed lifeways, etc.
B.W. Powell is founder and onetime director of North East Archaeological Researchers and a member of several state archaeological societies. He has authored numerous site reports and studies on the archaeology of southern New England. He has been named to the Committee on American Archaeology of The Archaeological Institute of America.
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