Sep 22, 2025 Beavers in America: Part 1
Video credit: Stefan Krisa, iStock
Introduction
The North American beaver (Castor canadensis) was an easily commodifiable resource for the first European colonizers of the New World. Its Old-World cousin (Castor fiber) had been extirpated from western Europe by the early Middle Ages. Still, an estimated 60-400 million of these valued furbearers were there for the taking in the Americas.[1] Beaver pelts had been used to make waterproof garments and accessories for as long as anyone could remember. However, a breakthrough in processing the dense undercoat into a waterproof felt perfect for making hats created an extraordinary demand to feed a growing millinery industry. What Glynnis Hood has called a “mammalian gold rush” (and others more bluntly a slaughter[2]) unfolded over the course of two and a half centuries until by the 1890s New World beaver populations had been decimated and confined to just a few refugia.
No longer worth the effort to pursue commercially, beaver populations began a slow recovery and remain today only a fraction of what they once were. Beginning as a basic subsistence resource, beaver became the center of a vast commercial enterprise critical to many colonial economies and transforming the cultural, social and political lives of many Indigenous peoples. After falling out of the commercial picture, they have recently been reborn as ‘ecological services’ providers.[3] As Margot Francis puts it, beavers provide a “shifting representational history” of changing meaning and significance.[4] The future of our relationship with this species is still uncertain. Beavers will not be allowed to reclaim more than a fraction of the landscape they formerly occupied, and that which they do reclaim will often bring them into conflict with humans. As encounters increase, will beavers be part of redefining and reshaping human-wildlife relationships, or just another pest to be controlled by whatever means are expedient? In this three-part series, we explore this question.
Exploiting beaver
The exploitation of beavers began even before modern humans were present. Evidence of cut marks on beaver remains from Bilzingsleben in central Germany dates to around 400,000 BP,[5] a period during the middle Pleistocene (2.6 M to ~12,000 years ago) that paleontologists refer to as the “muddle in the middle”.[6] The “muddle” is that several closely related hominins could have been present in Europe, any of whom could have been hunting beaver. To date, we have only evidence of cut marks on beaver remains and the tools used to make them, not physical evidence of the makers. Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), Denisovans (awaiting a taxonomic assignment), and even some late form of Homo erectus could be candidates, but it seems most likely that an “archaic” species of human known as ‘Heidelberg man’ (Homo heidelbergensis)[7] did the hunting. Homo sapiens sapiens would not be around for another ten millennia or more.
In the New World, beavers were also hunted over a much shorter period and probably sparingly, given the abundance of other easily hunted wildlife.[8] When Europeans first arrived in the Americas, beavers ranged from the Yukon to Northern Mexico, with upwards of 24 subspecies claimed.[9] Besides looking for a passage to the Orient, the early explorers hoped to find mineral resources like gold and silver. Instead, they found animal wealth, first in the coastal fish bonanza that drew fleets across the ocean, and then in the fur trade once dry land processing of fish had begun. Many of the first contacts went unrecorded, but it is known that by 1580, France alone had 150 ships visiting the New World, many of them engaged in the fur trade.[10] Well before then, John Cabot (1497) and Jacques Cartier had explored what was to become Canada. Cartier explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1531. On a second voyage from 1535 to 1536, he travelled up the river to establish a site where Montreal is now.[11] Early trading centers were established. One of the first permanent stations was established at Port Royal in 1606,[12] and in 1608, Samuel de Champlain founded a post where Quebec is today. Shortly thereafter, France granted him the first fur trading monopoly in North America.[13]
To the South, the new colonists rushed to exploit their beaver populations. Dutch, French and British interests in the beaver trade mixed toxically with the lives of numerous Indigenous peoples as old European rivalries and conflicts transferred to the New World. In the Connecticut Valley, the Dutch were engaged in the fur trade by 1614, moving into the Hudson River region only to be displaced by the British. In New England, beavers were extirpated by the end of the 17th century, as Hurons and Iroquois pursued the animals intensely.[14] As one indicator of their abundance, it has been estimated that approximately 11,000 square miles of the Connecticut drainage basin held upwards of 500,000 beavers before the start of the fur trade. But by 1700, they were gone. For the settlers who looked to farm, this was a boon. The extirpation of beavers freed upwards of 900,000 acres of wetlands and beaver meadows for immediate planting without the back-breaking work of tree removal.[15] While beaver pelts contributed to the initial economic growth of colonial America, the lands beaver had occupied and prepared for the farmers also contributed handsomely.
The exploitation of beavers reached a form of insanity that led to both social and economic upheaval. As but one example, the French and Indian War (1754-1763) overlapped with the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) in Europe between Britain and Prussia against France and Austria. In the Americas, France and Britain fought for trade control and pulled any Native-American tribes into the conflict on one side or the other. While the British were the eventual victors, the French held on to areas further from the East Coast but struggled to regulate trade as it grew exponentially. In 1697, Louis XIV decreed that all French fur outposts west of the Great Lakes except one had to close to prevent the price of pelts from falling.[16] By 1700, Francis Parkman and Horace Martin described the wholesale destruction of warehoused pelts as a newly formed French company saw no better course than to burn three-fourths of the accumulated furs to keep European prices elevated.[17]
In 1670, Charles II granted a monopoly over British-controlled lands originating in the Hudson Bay region to the Hudson Bay Company (HBC), which dominated the beaver fur trade for over two centuries. HBC became the most significant private landholder in history, with suzerainty (after merging with the Northwest Company) over an area nearly the size of Western Europe, or about 8% of the earth’s surface.[18] From 1823 to 1841, HBC carried out a “fur desert” policy in the Pacific Northwest, aimed at keeping Americans from moving into territory, which was then contested between Britain and the new United States. George Simpson, the head of HBC at the time, sent trapping parties into what is now Oregon under instructions to depopulate the area of beavers in the belief that this would make it unattractive for Americans to move west. Instead, an increasing number of freelance trappers who became known as “mountain men” worked the Continental Divide. At the same time, John Jacob Astor performed an end run and established his Astoria Fur Company along the west coast after arriving by sea.[19] In the end, HBC survived, but over a fading fur industry. Between the near extirpation of beavers throughout their former range and a shift in fashion as silk hats took over the millinery industry, beaver trapping as an enterprise waned. This did not end the commercialization of beavers; it just moved it off the main stage to become a side show. Today, beavers are still “harvested” for their pelts, just not in the way they once had been.
The Chroniclers
An interest in the animals themselves accompanied the almost insatiable demand for beaver pelts. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of a Eurocentric study of natural history (or natural philosophy as it was called then), coincident with great voyages of exploration and discovery. Indigenous peoples had their own take on beaver habits and behavior derived from accumulated knowledge in the form of oral traditions. Most of this was lost during European colonization. Still, at least some of the European perspective drew from it, in addition to producing its own facts (and not a little fiction) about the natural history of the beaver.
It is difficult to discern where much of the early information came from, given the liberal borrowing of ideas before copyright laws and the obscurity today of the sources that were much better known in their own time. Some early chroniclers, like Samuel Hearne, the first European to chart the Canadian northwest, relied on indigenous (Denesuline) knowledge about the beaver there.[20] Hearne was especially critical of the speculative accounts about beavers already circulating by the end of the sixteenth century, noting that he couldn’t “refrain from smiling” on reading different authors on beavers, as it seemed they competed with one another to see who could produce the most exaggerated fiction.
Perhaps he had in mind Nicholas Denys, whose 1672 natural history noted that these animals ought, as was the otter, to be classified as a fish, going on to describe seasonal gatherings of upwards of 400 beaver who organized themselves into classes of “architects” and “overlords” to direct the manual laborers.[21] This characterization was accepted by others, most notably Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), the most influential naturalist of his time, who added the refinement that the period of assembly was the months of June and July. It repeats in sequential publications of his works in 1800, 1807 and 1828 and was even embellished further by influential contemporaries such as Thomas Bewick, who claimed that a “social compact” was arrived at by overseer and beaver laborers to achieve cooperation in the construction of large “apartments” to house their numbers.[22]
This “social compact” theory enjoyed widespread if uncritical acceptance, perhaps because it adhered to a patriarchal social model that European and colonial elites could readily understand and appreciate. [23] To his credit, Buffon, like Hearne, did criticize what he called the exaggerations of others who attributed to beaver ideas of policy and government, the enslaving of strangers and travelers, and a curious form of self-mutilation in which animals that hunters pursued would self-castrate and offer up their testicles to save themselves, an ancient claim traceable to both Aesop and Aelian.[24] Other claims, such as beaver catching and eating fish, or even being domesticated to bring their catch back to human owners,[25] persisted for a short time before being discarded or disproved.
Sorting through beaver fact and fiction would become the avocation of later naturalists, often laboring under the disadvantage of not having actual subjects to observe. However, Beaver did cling to life in remote areas, and beyond that, their works – the dams, lodges and canals – remained like the monuments of vanished civilizations long after the animals who built them were gone. One of the most remarkable of the beaver chroniclers, Lewis Henry Morgan, expressed this theme. In the following article, we will examine his record and the efforts he and others mounted to define further and describe what it meant to have beavers at work on a landscape level.
[1] This was the range produced by Earnest Thompson Seton in his The Lives of the Game Animals (1929), based on extrapolations from population estimates from several places where beaver were still found. Seton remarks that the 60 million figure is a safe and conservative estimate of the population in primitive times. Dietland Muller-Schwarz and Lixing Sun, in their 2003 book The Beaver: Natural history of a wetlands engineer, put the range at 50 to 90 million.
[2] Dagg, A. I. (1974). Canadian Wildlife and Man. Toronto: McCelland Stewart Limited.
[3] The term reflects a peculiarly human construct of valuation, as in “what can this animal and its works do for me”? To that end it is more anthropocentric than desired.
[4] Francis, M. (2004). The strange career of the Canadian beaver: Anthropomorphic discourses and imperial history. Journal of Historical Sociology, 17(2‐3), 209–239.
[5] Gaudzinski-Windheuser, S., Kindler, L., & Roebroeks, W. (2023). Beaver exploitation, 400,000 years ago, testifies to prey choice diversity of Middle Pleistocene hominins. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 19766. doi:10.1038/s41598-023-46956-6
[6] Buck, L. T., & Stringer, C. B. (2014). Homo heidelbergensis. Current Biology, 24(6), R214-R215.
[7] Stringer, C. (2012). The status of Homo heidelbergensis (Schoetensack 1908). Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 21(3), 101-107.
[8] As Steve Nicholls put it in his 2009 work Paradise Found: Nature in America at the time of discovery. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press): “So abundant were North America’s natural resources that, whenever Europeans first encountered them, they were described as infinite.” (pg.382)
[9] Hall, R. E. (1981). The Mammals of North America (2nd. ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Hall’s classification is based on morphological analysis; a wide-scale analysis using contemporary genetic tools is to be forthcoming.
[10] Reiger, G. (1978). Hunting and trapping in the New World. In H. P. Brokaw (ed.), Wildlife and America (pp. 42–52). Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office.
[11] Hood, G. (2011). The Beaver Manifesto: Rocky Mountain Books Ltd.
[12] Dagg, A. I. (1974). op. cit.
[13] Novak, M. (1987). Beaver. In M. Novak, J. A. Baker, M. E. Obbard, & B. M. (eds), Wild Furbearer Management and Conservation in North America, pp. 282–313. Ontario, Canada: Ministry of Natural Resources.
[14] Kretch, S. I. (1999). The Ecological Indian: myth and history. New York NY: W.W. Norton & Co, Inc.
[15] Roberts, S. E. (2019). Hunting beaver: The postdiluvian world of the fur trade. In Colonial ecology, Atlantic economy: transforming nature in early New England (pp. 21–57): University of Pennsylvania Press.
[16] Bown, S. R. (2020). The Company: The rise and fall of the Hudson’s Bay empire. Canada: Anchor Canada.
[17] Reported by Francis Parkman in The Old Regieme in Canada (1891) and Horace Martin in Castorologia (1892). Martin also notes that when the English displaced the Dutch in 1664 and entered into competition for the fur trade, the French were forced to establish grades for skins and to set fixed prices. This did not stop the flow of skins taken from animals in the summer, when they were of no commercial value. These pelts were left to lie in warehouses until “eaten by moths”.
[18] Bown, S. R. (2020). The Company: The rise and fall of the Hudson’s Bay empire. Canada: Anchor Canada.
[19] Stark, P. (2014). Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s lost Pacific empire. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
[20] Hearne, S. (1795). A journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay, to the Northern Ocean. Undertaken by order of the Hudson’s Bay Company, for the discovery of copper mines, a northwest passage, &c., in the years 1769, 1770, 1771, & 1772 (J. B. Tyrrell Ed. 1911 ed.). London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell. Kjeldaas, S. (2023). Samuel Hearne, the Denesuline, and the Beaver. Interventions, 25(8), 1028–1053. doi:10.1080/1369801X.2023.2169622
[21] Denys, N. (1672). Description & Natural History of the Coasts of North America (Acadia) (W. F. Ganong, Trans.). Toronto: The Champlain Society. A translator’s note suggests that Denys no doubt was simply repeating stories current in his time.
[22] Bewick, T. (1807). A General History of Quadrupeds. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Edard Walker.
[23] Francis. (2004). Op cit.
[24] This account is repeated in Bestiaries popular in the Middle Ages but largely debunked by Buffon’s time. It is a good indicator of the unavailability of Eurasian beaver for first-hand observation, as it confused testicles with specialized sacs that carried castoreum, the latter used for both medical and cosmetic purposes by the ancients.
[25] Kalm, P. (1770). Travels into North America. London: T. Lowndes.