Our beautiful website has a virus. Nothing fatal don’t worry. But the lovely colored background that used to offset the text disappeared yesterday and no one from BlueHost was in the office to help us get it back. I tried, I won’t say valiantly, but desperately to get it back, and am able to set the deep blue again and match frame it for a moment but alas, I cannot ‘save’ it. It can’t be done by the likes of me. So for now we will have white space.
Sigh.
Let’s hope its not just the beginning. There’s plenty more mischief to be had where that came from I can assure you. And lets be cheered with this lovely video from Roxanne Gunn new to the Beaver Management Forum from Massachusetts. I especially like the camera angle.
Looking for distractions I’ve been playing researcher looking for historic reference to beaver in the San Luis Obispo, where they are still claiming beavers don’t belong. Well I got started reading about Isaac Graham. the beaver trapper of great fame who settled in the region and was famously the subject of what is called ‘the first trial’ of California. Seems Graham lead the ‘coup’ that over threw the Mexican Governor at the time. His subsequent capture, trial and imprisonment were said to be the thing that drove Washington to annex California in the first place.
Graham was a curmudgeon who took two wives and started a distillery in Monterey and another in Santa Cruz. He was by all accounts a greedy and difficult man. And not likely the kind of man to make a fortune from a single species and then decide to settle in the one lone region of the state where that species didn’t exist.
One of Graham’s buds was father Luis Martinez who ran the local mission that everything seemed to hinged on in those days. It is so fascinating to spend any time at all among historians, but two things especially jumped out out me. Always history teaches us dismissively that the Spanish/Mexicans who owned our state before we did weren’t interested in the fur trade. And didn’t partake of the quest for pelts. That always sounded odd to me because honestly, who isn’t ‘interested’ in money? And pelts were basically 20 dollar bills lying around just waiting to be picked up.
So father Luiz taught his indian flock to trap otter and ran a trade up and down the coast from SLO to Santa Barbara. He even deal with HBC. And you might be thinking yes for SEA OTTER not beaver, but what we have seen over and over again is that the names used for pelts were pretty interchangeable. Russians were famously trapping what they called ‘sea beaver’ in Russian River. And we all know there were references to river otter described as beaver and visa versa.
Beaver just meant I want that fur. So the term ‘otter’ may not mean strictly otter as we know it. Remember that the word ‘Nutria’ is spanish for ‘otter’. It’s a tangled mess out there.
Anyway, since Isaac had the OJ Trial of his day there is LOTS written about him, both at the time and since. I will keep sniffing and let you know what I find.
