Tall beaver tales show a vital animal in Canada’s history was also misunderstood

In this excerpt from “The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire,” the author discusses what else but the beaver, so vital for the early founding of the Hudson’s Bay Co. It seems the rodent’s importance paled in comparison to its reputation.

The Jesuit priest Father Le Jeune wrote in 1634 that the Montagnais “say that (beaver) is the animal well-beloved by the French, English and Basques, in a word, by the Europeans.” When he was a guest travelling in their country, Le Jeune “heard my host say one day, jokingly, ‘The Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; and, in short, it makes everything.’

He probably thought he was joking at the time, but given the ecosystem services the beaver provides, we know better now.

Beavers were important animals in the cultural and spiritual traditions of many Indigenous peoples of North America, a source of metaphorical symbolism. In some mythologies they could represent perseverance or hard work and productivity, but also stubbornness. Beavers could be represented as the shapers of the world, a nod to their transformative landscape redesign. Conversely, they could be viewed as selfish for continuously building dams and flooding places without consulting other animals.

Yes those SELFISH beavers. Storing water, providing more nutrients for fish, frogs and otters. Just where do they get off anyway?

Beavers could occupy symbolic positions in the cosmology and were often used as allegory, the classic example being the Woman Who Married a Beaver, an Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) story in which a woman leaves her people and goes to dwell with her husband, a beaver, only returning to visit her human family periodically. They have children, and the husband and offspring, who also occasionally visit the human world, are killed by hunters but return alive to the beaver world each time with gifts of tobacco and needles and other trade goods.

Only upon the beaver-husband’s death in the beaver world do the woman and her children return to the human world, bringing with them an important message: always honour the beaver and never discredit or slander them on pain of bringing down a curse of poor fortune at hunting.

Well of course. Obviously. Everybody knows that.

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Written accounts of beavers had them dwelling in sprawling communal house-villages, speaking to each other and working in organized groups to secure food and build their dome-like dwellings. Some writers claimed that they had social stratification, including the use of beaver- slaves to speed the construction. One early 18th-century observer, Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, mused that “there are sometimes three or four hundred of them in one place, forming a town which might properly enough be called a little Venice.”

Gosh I want to go, don’t you? Actually American writer James Fenimore Cooper said a similar thing in “Last of the Mohicans“. Either it really happened or lots of people in different places convinced themselves it happened. When you look at the huge beaver dam in Alberta that was built by multiple generations of many families working together, it seems a little less foolish.

In his classic “Journey to the Northern Ocean” he wrote: “I cannot refrain from smiling when I read the accounts of different authors who have written on the economy of those animals, as there seems to be a contest between them, who shall most exceed in fiction … Little remains to be added beside a vocabulary of their language, a code of their laws, and a sketch of their religion.”

Hearne also addressed the claim that the beaver’s tail was actually a natural trowel used in the construction of their apartments or for plastering the inner walls. “It would be as impossible for a beaver to use its tail as a trowel,” he wrote, “ … as it would have been for Sir James Thornhill to have painted the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral without the assistance of scaffolding.”

Now that’s pretty darn interesting. A scoffer of beaver lore before me. I might need to check out what Mr. Thornill has to say.

Since ancient times in the Mediterranean, castoreum was variously deployed by physicians as a cure for epilepsy, to induce abortions and to assuage the ravages of tuberculosis. It also had other properties that were suitable to a difficult-to-obtain and expensive medicinal ingredient: it could cure dementia, toothaches and gout as well as relieve headaches and fevers. (Castoreum does contain salicylic acid, the main ingredient in Aspirin, so this last was probably an accurate claim.)

Um I don’t know if aspirin can do all that, but it has its benefits surely.

That such a gentle and innocuous creature should inspire such artistic liberty seems unusual, but the money to be had from processing their pelts and castoreum was also unusual. Whether there was any empirical evidence justifying the value of castoreum is open to question. But when has fashion had anything to do with science or proof? Or even common sense? The hunt for beavers was beginning the economic transformation of a continent.

Ominous. And True. I was just reminded that there were harder times to save beavers than now. Currently we are just encouraging people to be slightly inconvenienced. 200 years ago it would have meant talking people out of their economy, their country, their freedom, their future.