Category: History

Fur trade feminism

heidi08 History May 20, 2014

Madeline La Framboise was born on Mackinac island, the daughter of a french trapper and an Ottawa indian. Her father died when she was just three years old and she was raised among her mother’s family in an Ottawa village at the mouth of the grand river in Michigan. At the ripe age of 14 she married trapper Joseph La Framboise. The pair had two children and repeated the marraige for the Catholic church several years later.

During the spring of 1806 young Joseph La Framboise and his courageous wife traveled by canoe from Mackinac and established a trading post one and a half miles west of the present site of Lowell, on the bank of Grand river. There a cabin was built of logs chinked with clay and bark, and about thirty feet long.

Madeline knew the trade, and was a great help in the business so her dealing was essential to its success.

In the spring of 1809 the La Framboises’ were returning from their winter quarters at Mackinac with their usual retinue of French voyageurs and Indians. Dusk coming on they encamped on the lake shore midway between the present cities of Muskegon and Grand Haven. That night Joseph La Framboise was murdered by a drunken Pottawattamie Indian.

Her husband murdered by a drunken indian? Considering that she was half Ottowan herself, and the grandaughter of a chief no less, that seemed a little unlikely. The tale sounded so much like racism I scoured for more stories, but found none. Whatever transpired left Madeline a widow with two small children and a tradepost to manage or sell.

Through the long sad summer that followed Madame La Framboise carried on the work at the trading post so efficiently that the Astor Fur Co. made her the official agent in place of her deceased husband. The Indians held her in high esteem.

“For a female to be that involved in the fur trade — to be the boss — was incredible,” said David Schmid, a Byron Center amateur historian and historical re-enactor who has studied fur trading of the Great Lakes and early French explorers like Étienne Brûlé Robert de LaSalle and Father Jacques Marquette.

She must have been good at what she did. She could neither read nor write but spoke four languages fluently. French, English, Ottawa and Chippewa. She became a wealthy woman at a time when belts were already starting to tighten in the fur trade. She never married again, and she fought off the encroaching competition of Astor for a valiantly long time.

She aptly fended off competition from John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company until convinced to sell her interest to Rix Robinson in 1818, who moved the post to Ada.

Her role as boss was notable from a European cultural perspective, Schmid said. However, in native culture, which was much more matriarchal, La Framboise’s position as a female businesswoman was likely less surprising.

Not to mention the culture of the animal whose slaughter they were getting rich off. Which also happens to be matriarchal. Or was before it was destroyed. Maddy got out at the right time because by the 1820’s there were very few beaver left in Michigan. Or Wisconsin. Or Wyoming. And ten years later there were not even any left in California. So well did the trappers do their job.

As for La Framboise herself, she died April 4, 1846 on Mackinac Island, where she had become a Sunday school teacher. Her son, Joseph, became a fur trader and lived most of his life along the Minnesota River Valley. Her daughter. Josette, married the brother of President Franklin Pierce and died young.

Her home on the island has become a hotel for tourists, the Harbour View Inn. She was buried beneath the altar of St. Anne’s Catholic Church, beside Josette and a grandson, and later moved to a sepulcher in the church yard.

She was 66 when she died, and at the height of her trade was making 10,000 a month which was far more than her competition. She is remembered as one of Michigan’s first (and finest) business women. She never had her picture taken, but the home on Mackinac island where she retired is still visited and remembered to this day.

La Framboise in English translates to “the rasberry”. So think of her and the tycoon compulsion we have to exploit resources for unspendable amounts of wealth the next time you enjoy this seasonal fruit.

From the “say anything” beaver files…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, History March 30, 2014

There were no news stories this morning about beaver so I went surfing the internet(s). I found a very inviting looking blog called “Natural Wild Life” and thought I’d settle in for a nice read about beavers with this lead photo. Wow, was I in for a surprise! The photos and content get even more surprising farther down the page.

Natural Wild Life | Beaver | The beaver (genus Castor) is a primarily nocturnal, large, semi-aquatic rodent. Beavers are most well known for their distinctive home-building that can be seen in rivers and streams. The beavers dam is built from twigs, sticks, leaves and mud and are surprisingly strong. Here the beavers can catch their fish and swim in the water.

I’ll grant that there are plenty of people taking up space on the planet that learned from some cartoon that beavers live in the dam. But how many will say aloud that they catch fish? Or write about it on a nature website which they have maintained for 3 years? I wonder if all the other articles are as interesting. This a good opportunity to revisit an old post on beaver myths. There are several posts on the subject – but this has to be my favorite. It’s from July 2008, (which reminds us all that I have been doing this for a dam long time).

Beaver myths throughout the ages

Quia cum vena torem se insequentem conovit, morsu testiculos sibi abscidit, et in faciem vena toris eos proicit et sic fugiens evadit

Turns out that complete misunderstanding of beaver behavior is nothing new. In fact the poor beaver has been miserably misunderstood since the middle ages and beyond. The above auspicious slander is taken from the Aberdeen Bestiary, which is a work documenting real and fictional creatures and their moral significance.The Bestiary goes back as far as the fourth century, although the addition of European animals like the beaver were added later.

To be fair, the bestiary was never intended as a “National Geographic of the Middle Ages”. It was a religious rather than a zoological text. But its pernicious misrepresentation of beavers lasted woefully to the Victorian era. Read for yourself:

Of the beaver There is an animal called the beaver, which is extremely gentle; its testicles are are highly suitable for medicine. Physiologus says of it that, when it knows that a hunter is pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes.

So the story goes that the beaver is hunted for its castorum and decides to bite off its own testicles and throw them to the hunter rather than be killed. Check out the illustration of the same: (Yes that longlegged dog-looking thing is supposed to be a beaver)

This all comes about from mistaken entomology in which it is assumed that the beavers latin name (castor) is related to the root of castrate, and whimsy just takes over from there. The misconnection is untangled here.

Now I don’t know much about bestiaries and the middle ages, but I can only assume that every male of every species that has ever existed is partial to his own testicles and therefore unlikely to sacrifice them in favor of a protected aquatic life. I can’t fathom that anyone ever believed this, and can’t believe that it is quoted all the way up to 2008. Still the story served a particular need of a society that wanted to benefit from castoreum and fur and didn’t much care about accuracy. People were able to ignore their own perceptions and experience of the world in order to see the impossible story that fit their needs.

I sure am glad that doesn’t happen any more.

Oh and the blog post also says the Canadian beaver is the “most common” which makes me very curious indeed. What other beavers might there be in his neighborhood? As far as I know there are three species of beavers in the entire world, one basically extinct in Mongolia, castor Fiber in Europe and Castor Canadensis in North America. I’d love to hear about the other ones the author is familiar with.

Get ready for beavers in Santa Barbara!

heidi08 History March 18, 2014

Off to Chumash territory this morning to talk about beavers and steelhead and stream restoration. In case you’ve forgotten, the Chumash once had 7000 miles of coastal territory that included Santa Barbara. An old Chumash medicine woman explained that you could create a spring in dry land by planting a beaver-chewed stick in the ground where you wanted it to appear. And it was the Chumash who gave us this, which was my first historical nativity discovery lo these many years ago, when I was SHOCKED to read that fish and game didn’t think they were native in most places. That was before the papers were published, before we knew about the archeologist, before anyone else but Rickipedia was even on board.

Seems fitting to be headed in that direction. Wish me luck!

Could Fish Victory become Beaver Victory?

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History June 12, 2014

Salmon win court ruling that ‘sets aside’ Marin countywide plan

In a sharply critical decision that leaves Marin’s planning document in legal limbo, an appellate court ordered more analysis of how development affects San Geronimo Valley’s endangered coho salmon.

The ruling by the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco reversed a Marin Superior Court decision, “sets aside” the 2007 countywide plan and its environmental report pending study of the impact of creekside building on salmon, and declared that a building ban was improperly imposed in San Geronimo.

Did you read about the Marin appellate decision protecting salmon? Our friends at SPAWN took the powers that be to court with the backing of some 22 conservation organizations and won a decision that is making no friends among the developers.

Fishery activists at the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network of Forest Knolls, which contested county compliance with state environmental law and sued to get tougher creekside building rules, hailed the ruling as a triumph. “We hope that after this decision, county supervisors are ready to work together so we can save these species from extinction,” said Todd Steiner, head of the salmon network.

“The judges agreed with Spawn that the county acted unlawfully because the environmental impact report provides no help to decision-makers or the public to understand the likely consequences of allowable build out,” said Deborah Sivas of Stanford Law School’s Environmental Clinic, which represented the salmon network along with attorney Michael Graf.

If that name sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Michael Graf was the attorney who represented Worth A Dam in the failed effort to stop the sheet pile from going through the beaver lodge. Remember? He generously charged us very little and got his friend the geomorphologist to walk our creek and do the same. The city didn’t mind breaking the law anyway, but that’s blood under the bridge now. Seems like eons ago that I was worried the sheet pile would kill the beavers or drive them away. Congratulations Michael and SPAWN for a fight well won!

All this lays the foundation for the NEXT lawsuit to appear in Marin. One where trapping ‘nuisance’ beavers is considered a threat to the salmon population. What’s that you say, beavers weren’t native to Marin? (Or Alameda? Or San Jose?) Guess what was published and went online yesterday?

Here’s the abstract, but you really need to go read the whole thing. Eli’s graphs are stunning.

The North American beaver (Castor canadensis ) has not been considered native to the watersheds of coastal California or the San Francisco Bay Area. These assertions form the basis of current wildlife management policies regarding that aquatic mammal, and they date to the first half of the 20th century. This review challenges those long-held assumptions based on verifiable (physical) and documented (reliable observational) records. Novel findings are facilitated by recently digitized information largely inaccessible prior to the 21st century. Understanding that beaver are native to California’s coastal watersheds is important, as their role in groundwater recharge, repair of stream channel incision, and restoration of wetlands may be critically important to the conservation of threatened salmonids, as well as endangered amphibians and riparian-dependent birds,

The timing on this could NOT be better, as we head off to the Salmonid Restoration Conference this week. It ends with a piercing reminder of how important beavers are to salmon, which I’m hoping the timing of the Marin decision bumps into the news cycle. There are a lot of parts I love about this paper, and Rick’s son did a stunning job of pulling the whole thing together, but you’ll pardon me if this is my very favorite part:

Today California’s coastal beaver are widely regarded as the non-native survivors of twentieth century translocations, and when they cause flooding problems or fell trees, depredation permits are often provided. Understanding beaver as native to coastal ecosystems may impact this decision-making.

Of course, I would have phrased less subtly, like STOP PRETENDING YOU’RE KILLING BEAVERS BECAUSE THEY AREN’T NATIVE, IDIOTS, but this paper and the sierra ones should permanently bury the myths about beaver absence from most of California.

49 other states never believed it anyway. I’m glad we finally tackled the 50th.

Treasures from an unexpected source

heidi08 Beavers, Environmental, History January 6, 2014

A friend posted this 1927 technical bulletin from USDA on the beaver management facebook group Bailey beaver habits 1927. It was written by Vernon Bailey who was a biologist for their Investigation Bureau. There was some usual bunk about beavers causing troubles and a big discussion of how to manage them on farms, but there were unexpected tidbits I think you’ll really appreciate.

In case you can’t read the caption it says “Baby beavers are gentle and affectionate. These animals would be delightful playmates for children if they did not sleep most of their day and carry on their activities mostly at night”. No kidding!

In addition to idly pointing out that baby beavers are sweet, this early bulletin shows some ways to manage beaver conflicts – including wrapping trees ;

The trees cut by beavers for food^ and building material are generally of little value. They are mainly aspens, cottonwoods,birches, and pin cherries, or such shrubby woods as willows,alders, bush maples, hazels, and smaller bushes. Some choice trees,however, are occasionally cut along lake or stream fronts or in orchards near the water, and complaints of real damage and losses are at times registered; but in many cases the trees could be protected with strips of woven wire at a cost of a few cents each and the beavers left unmolested.

And even an early flow device design;

Remember this was published 87 years ago. And not by some crazy beaver lover like me, but by their own biologist. In 2014 USDA is still saying there is no way to manage beavers or control flooding. Even Jimmy Taylor says the issue needs “more research”. When did the I.Q. of beaver management fall off so badly?

But this is the part that made my jaw drop.

It is often charged that beavers interfere with or injure fishing in streams where they build dams, and some persons still believe that they catch and eat fish. There is, however, no evidence of a beaver ever catching, killing, or eating any animal food. Of all captive beavers kept and studied and of young beavers raised, not one has been found that would touch or eat fish or meat in any form.

That beaver dams may in some cases, in slow or sluggish streams,spread out the water over marsh vegetation, forming shallow, warm ponds with decaying plants on the bottom quite unsuited to trout or fish of any kind is well known. Usually, however, such streams are not important fish streams before dammed by the beavers, and in course of time the water is freed from such decaying matter and is as satisfactory for fishes as before.

In cold, rapid streams, naturally well adapted to trout, beaver ponds rarely become sufficiently warm and stagnant to interfere with the comfort of fishes, and in most cases the deepening and extending of the water area above the dam increases the feeding and spawning area,providing deep pools and hiding places where the fishes thrive and escape detection long enough to grow up to larger size. In many streams both in the mountains and over a vast expanse of north country the trout fishing is greatly benefited by the presence of beavers, their dams, and ponds. Large trout and good fishing are commonly found in beaver ponds.

So the frickin’ USDA knew 100 years ago that beavers were good for fish and PEI is still stomping around killing beavers to protect salmon. That’s infuriating. The issues around beaver management are a mobius strip where whenever we think we are done addressing the last concern we find we are right back at the beginning again.

Honestly if you have a free moment, I would go check out the whole thing. Skip through the part about how to kill them or cook them but there’s a very nice passage about beaver vocalizations I’ll share as it made me think of mom.

Old beavers are generally supposed to be voiceless, except for a loud blowing sound made when scared or angry, but one day when photographs were being taken of the old beaver and her six young the young became chilly in the cold spring water, and when their mother was out of sight they began crying and calling for her in distressed tones. Soon from the shade of the other bank where she was lying on the water, she raised her nose slightly above the surface and made several soft mooing notes, like a long o-o-o-o pronounced with the lips closed. At once recognizing the call, the young quickly swam across and climbed up on her back, where they sat, warming their cold toes and tails in her fur and combing the water out of their hair, perfectly contented.