For the beaver

Last week on this blog, I posed the question: What would make a man like John Colter travel back into the wilderness after having just spent two long years there? This week I will take some time to look at the answer that he might have given.

Beaver.

The industrious amphibious rodent that drives Phil Robertson to apoplexy, was also the reason that John Colter, Jim Bridger, and Kit Carson, among many other less well-known names, made their way into the Rocky Mountains and spent years of their lives surrounded by danger and hardship. What could it be about this relatively inoffensive creature that drove men to spend their health and often their lives pursuing it?

The engineering works of the beaver alone are worth comment. The ponds that are created by their dams provide wetland habitat beneficial to many other species, including but not limited to waterfowl, deer, bear, and moose. It is no coincidence that I list many animals who are commonly hunted for sport, but the benefits of a beaver pond are not only limited to those seeking recognition from the Boone and Crockett club. I read that an observer once counted one hundred twenty four species of birds and thirty seven mammals making use of a beaver pond over the course of a year. Yet it was not fascination about the engineering skills of the beaver, or their support of the habitat that drove the mountain men to trap them in their millions.

The beaver as a food source is apparently nothing to write home about. In my studies, I have found numerous reports of mountain men broiling the fatty tails of the beaver, but no special mention of the men actually consuming the rest of the meat. I imagine that they did at times, because hunger was a regular feature of their lives, but the mountain men do not seem to have made beaver a regular part of their diet. This may pass without notice for we who are looking back across two hundred years. I doubt there is one of us today who would even consider beaver meat as a possible dinner option, but we must remember that these were the mountain men. They regularly ate some pretty awful sounding stuff.

Most of the books I have read about the fur trapping years mention the mountain men eating raw buffalo liver straight from the carcass of a freshly killed animal. Many of the books also claim that the trappers would squirt bile from the gall bladder onto the liver as a kind of sauce and sometimes use gunpowder as a seasoning. Now, if only one of the books had mentioned the practice I may have dismissed it as a tall story told to greenhorns, but it is so often repeated that I begin to believe they did just that. Not only in life or death, 'I must eat something or die' kind of situations, but as a matter of course, a delicacy if you will. If beaver meat tastes worse than raw buffalo liver coated with its own bile, than it must be bad indeed.

Maybe that is what potted meat is made of.

So if the mountain men did not chase the beaver out of scientific curiosity, or to sustain themselves, why go through all that trouble? The answer is simple of course:

Hats.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the height of fashion for men in both Europe and North America was to own a hat made of felt. The highest quality felt came from the beaver, and the highest quality beaver came from the Rockies. Top hats, cocked hats, tricorns, Paris beau, and many other silly looking hats that I don't know the names for, were all made from felt taken from beaver hides. Hides which were themselves taken from beavers who lived in what is now the western United States and Canada. The only thing that saved the beaver from being wiped out was the fad for silk hats that sprang up in around the 1830's.

So the reason that the reckless breed went west was simple really. Rich men buy hats made from beaver, therefore I (says the mountain man) will spend the next twenty or so years of my life chasing the toothy buggers along rivers infested with giant bears and belligerent Indians. If I am able to gather enough beaver pelts, then someday I may be able to afford a hat of my own.

I guess I haven't hit on the real reason the mountain men did what they did after all.

As a parting thought for this week, I wonder if anything I am wearing or using right now has some fascinating story behind it. Is some amazing creature being hunted to extinction by larger than life adventurers who will have stories written about their lives two hundred years from now? Something makes me doubt it, but the thought makes me want to be one of the adventurers and not just the guy wearing a silly hat.

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