Eager by Ben Goldfarb

Author:Ben Goldfarb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

In many ways California’s beavers followed a fairly typical trajectory. Jedediah Smith led trapping parties to the region in the late 1820s, becoming the first white Americans to reach California through the Southwest, the first to travel north along the coast to the Columbia River, and the first to traverse the Sierra Nevada and the fearsome “Sand Plain” beyond.13 Peter Skene Ogden’s ruthless band ransacked streams around Mount Shasta, Klamath Lake, and the Humboldt River. Those pioneering journeys opened the state to still more trappers and traders, who found a furry bounty waiting for them in the marshy Sacramento Valley.

But in one key respect, the California story diverged. Along the Pacific Coast, unlike the rest of the continent, beavers were not the most valuable pelt on the market. Sea otters, lovable maritime cousins to weasels, gamboled from the Aleutian Islands to the Baja Peninsula, prying sea urchins, crabs, and bivalves open upon their plush bellies. To survive the frigid Pacific and their own deficit of body fat, otters evolved the animal kingdom’s thickest pelt—up to a million hairs per inch, several times denser than even the beaver’s underwool. When Russian explorers returned from Alaska bearing exquisite otter pelts in the 1740s, the promyshleniki, a class of professional hunters whose brutality surpassed even the Americans’, sprang into action. Boatloads of promyshleniki ravaged the Aleutian Islands, rounding up natives, forcing them to slaughter otters, and massacring dissenters. Hunters shipped “soft gold” to China and turned their attention south, toward California. Meanwhile Captain James Cook stumbled upon the lucrative trade during his West Coast voyages, and his logbook, published posthumously in 1784, stirred American and British merchants to action. By 1801 a steady crawl of merchant ships, most from Boston, were braving the tempestuous churn of Cape Horn en route to the West Coast, where they loaded their holds with furs before sailing to China.14

Although otters were the targets of the West Coast trade, plenty of beavers met their ends as well. While trading for sea otters and fur seals along the California coast and the Columbia River, for instance, the ship Albatross also scooped up 248 beaver pelts. The Russian ship Kodiak collected beavers as well as otters from Bodega Bay before heading back to Alaska in 1809.15 Just as native trappers once funneled pelts to English and Dutch traders on the East Coast, California’s coastal tribes piped furs to American and Russian mariners throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—years before Smith, Ogden, and other overland parties showed up. California’s wildlife was also exploited by the Spanish, who’d occupied the region since 1697.

The upshot is that, by the time overland travelers reached California from North America’s interior, the state’s beavers had already been depleted. Beaver-minded explorers, Jedediah Smith among them, reported finding the animals scarce in many coastal and Bay Area streams, unwittingly reflecting a century of trapping and trading. Streams that spilled from the Sierra Nevada into the Central Valley were trapped top-to-bottom by Smith and his ilk, but American trappers kept few records of their pickings.

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