As if the world of beaver research wasn’t confusing enough! What with beaver photos actually being nutria photos, and nutria being the spanish word for otter, and now the discovery of the very, very desirable SEA BEAVER. The illustration is from AUDUBON. (I guess there just so far an interest in birds can take you!)Just look at how happy Captain Cook was to find sea beaver in his third voyage along the pacific which dealt a blow to the Russians.
The object of this excitement was a playful marine mammal with a lustrous coat–the sea beaver. Its pelt was first encountered by Cook at Nootka Sound. The Nootkas also swapped fish, whale oil, venison, and even wild garlic.But the Englishmen preferred furs. Midshipman Edward Riou of the Discovery wrote: “The Natives continue their Visits bringing with them apparently every thing they are in possession of, but nothing is so well received by us as skins,particularly those of the sea beaver, the fur of which is very soft and delicate…The Englishmen literally bought the Nootkas’ clothing off their backs! Ledyard summarized the trading:We purchased while here about 1500 beaver.
1500 beaver. Meaning otter. Meaning modern man just taught the natives the disgusting value of taking far, far, more than you can use. And incidentally meaning if you were trying to establish for your dissertation that the Nootkas used beaver skins as part of their clothing you would be stitch out of luck, because to the fur crazy minds of the time, (with dollar signs where their eyes should be), BEAVER didn’t mean beaver with a flat tail, building dams and chopping trees with its teeth. It meant “Wow, that’s nice looking fur that could make me a lot of money, lets kill it.” So there was River beaver, Sea beaver, and heck in the 1930’s they even referred to Space beaver!
Which is why, if you are finished with the papers firmly establishing beavers in the sierras and starting to work on the paper that shows beavers in California’s coastal streams, you’d be so happy with this find from Kate Lundquist of the OAEC who has been painstakingly hobnobbing with scholars to learn about the history of the Russian River:
The juiciest find I have gotten thus far is from archaeologist Glenn Farris. In 2006, he translated, annotated and published Cyrille Laplace’s account of his visit to Bodega Bay and Ft. Ross in 1839. Laplace was a French rear admiral who circumnavigated the globe from 1837-1840. On his tour of the Russian Ranchos, he states: “It was thus that we came at last, after several hours en route, to the second farm that we were to see, but not before we had stopped a moment by a little river on the banks of which my traveling companion pointed out to me the former habitations of beaver, probably destroyed by the Indians in order to catch the rich prize that lay within.
You see, young Jedi, beavers make lodges but otters don’t. So if Mr. Laplace saw a lodge that had been ripped apart by indians, that means it was a real BEAVER lodge on the Russian River about 150 years ago. Castor Canadensis in the wine country like we always knew was true.
Paper three here we come!
