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Once They Were Hats
In Search of the Mighty Beaver
By Frances Backhouse ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Frances Backhouse
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-755-3
CHAPTER 1
INTO THE HEART OF BEAVERLAND
In 1497, when the Anglo-Italian navigator and explorer John Cabot landed on Newfoundland's rocky shores and kicked off the European invasion of North America, beavers inhabited almost all of what we now call Canada and the United States, plus a sliver of Mexico. They ranged from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific and from just south of the Rio Grande to the Mackenzie and Coppermine river deltas on the Arctic Ocean. The only off-limit regions were the Arctic barrens, the parched deserts of the extreme southwest and the alligator-patrolled swamps of the Florida peninsula. Otherwise, wherever they could find water and wood, beavers were present.
Although there are no firsthand written descriptions of North America during the beaver's Golden Age, David Thompson arrived sufficiently early and travelled widely enough to provide a credible report soon afterwards. In 1784, when he was just 14, Thompson sailed from England to Hudson Bay to apprentice as a clerk at a fur-trading post. Over the next three decades, employed first by the Hudson's Bay Company and later by the rival North West Company, he surveyed and mapped one-sixth of the continent. In the course of his work, he walked, rode and paddled nearly 90,000 kilometres, the equivalent of circling the globe twice.
Near the end of his life, Thompson gathered together all of his meticulously kept notebooks and field journals and penned a detailed account of his travels. In it he recalled a time, only a few generations earlier, when "Man was Lord of all the dry land and all that was on it" and beavers reigned over the rest.
"Previous to the discovery of Canada," Thompson wrote, "this Continent from the Latitude of forty degrees north to the Arctic Circle, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, may be said to have been in the possession of two distinct races of Beings, Man and the Beaver ... except [for] the Great Lakes, the waves of which are too turbulent, [the Beaver] occupied all the waters of the northern part of the Continent. Every River where the current was moderate and sufficiently deep, the banks at the water edge were occupied by their houses. To every small Lake, and all the Ponds they builded Dams, and enlarged and deepened them to the height of the dams. Even to grounds occasionally overflowed, by heavy rains, they also made dams, and made the permanent Ponds, and as they heightened the dams [they] increased the extent and added to the depth of the water; Thus all the low lands were in possession of the Beaver, and all the hollows of the higher grounds." In other words, beavers were everywhere.
The stronghold described by Thompson lay north of the fortieth parallel — a line that connects New York City to California's Mendocino County, passing through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Lincoln, Nebraska, along the way. Yet beavers were far from inconsequential in the southern half of their range. The Sacramento River, for instance, harboured an abundance of famously hefty beavers, especially in the marshlands near the mouth. One visitor to the lower Sacramento Valley in the mid-1800s wrote: "There is probably no spot of equal extent on the whole continent of America, which contains so many of these much sought for animals."
Unfortunately, it was one of the last outposts of the beaver's once-great empire and it, too, would soon fall.
When I first read David Thompson's account of the beaver's glory days, I wished I could have witnessed them myself. The more I learned about that erstwhile watery Eden, which I came to think of as Beaverland, the more I wanted to visit it. Impossible, of course, or so it seemed until I heard about the Beaver Capital of Canada.
Jean Thie, the man who discovered and named the Beaver Capital of Canada (which may well be the Beaver Capital of the World), is a landscape ecologist with a unique hobby. Born and raised in the Netherlands, Thie came to Canada as a 20-year-old graduate student in 1967 and went on to a distinguished career in government. His accomplishments included pioneering the use of geographic information system (GIS) technology in Canada, completing the Canada Land Inventory and directing the National Atlas Information Service. Now, as the president of an Ottawa-based remote sensing and geospatial mapping company, he specializes in contemplating terrain from a bird's-eye view and interpreting it for earthbound mortals. Studying things like permafrost melt and forest cover for government agencies and corporate clients is his job. Cruising virtually over the continent in search of beaver dams and lodges is his private obsession. Instead of playing computer games or watching television to relax, he spends hours at a time poking around on Google Earth and World Wind — scaling up and down, spinning the globe with a click of his mouse — with the sole purpose of exploring beaver haunts.
Thie began pursuing this quirky passion around 2004, in the early days of Google Earth, after he spotted a beaver dam while doing peatland research. Three years later, he zoomed in on the boggy lands at the base of the Pasquia Hills in east-central Saskatchewan and immediately recognized the area as a centre of exceptional beaver activity. He dubbed it the Beaver Capital of Canada.
In the satellite images Thie has posted on his website, the Beaver Capital looks like a moth-eaten blanket. The beaver ponds show up as widely spaced, black rents in the green fabric, their upslope margins ragged and diffuse, their downslope edges defined by the solid curves of the dams. In most of the ponds, a large beige dot punctuates the dark water, as unnatural-looking as the streets and houses in the tiny Cree community of Pakwaw Lake next door. These beaver lodges are no bigger than a single-car garage, but they're easily visible from outer space.
Since 2007, Thie has yet to find such a concentration of beaver dams anywhere else in all his virtual travels around North America. By his count, there are 15 to 20 dams per square kilometre and most of them have an associated lodge. Assuming that the average lodge houses about five beavers (a reasonable supposition), he figures that every square kilometre of these wetlands supports 50 to 100 beavers. Transpose that density to one of our human capitals and we'd have nearly 18,000 beavers wandering the streets of Washington, D.C., or more than a quarter of a million in Ottawa.
The moment I heard of Thie's discovery, I knew I had to go there. It seemed like the perfect place to find out what North America looked like back when beavers ruled. All I had to do was get to Nipawin, Saskatchewan, and follow Highway 55, also known as the Northern Woods and Water Route, until I reached the turnoff to Pakwaw Lake. The irregular polygon that Thie had superimposed on the website photos conveniently straddled the highway and stretched a few kilometres northwest along the Pakwaw Lake access road. I might not even have to get out of my car to see the castorid metropolis.
My journey to the Pasquia Hills began on an overcast July morning after a pleasant night in the Nipawin and District Regional Park campground. Heading east out of town, Highway 55 was a paved two-lane road, the kind of respectable rural thoroughfare that bisects and links small communities all across the prairies. The only indication that I was venturing off the beaten path was a sign on the edge of town: "No services 178 km." No problem, I thought. My destination was only 70 kilometres away and I had a full tank of gas. Not even the darkening sky ahead — slate grey above vibrant yellow canola fields — or the curtains of rain that swept the horizon could spoil my anticipation.
It was evident from Thie's website that he had never actually visited the Pakwaw beavers. (When we spoke later, he confirmed that he conducts all of his beaver research from his home office in Wakefield, Quebec.) Nor was the Beaver Capital marked on any map. But I wasn't worried. I had complete trust in my guide, though I had yet to even exchange emails with the man, and equal faith in Google Earth.
Still, I wasn't at all sure what I would find when I got there. After Jesuit historian Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix toured New France in the early 1720s, he reported that "there are sometimes three or four hundred [beavers] together in one place, forming a town which might properly enough be called a little Venice." Surely an exaggeration, but secretly I was hoping for such a sight.
At first, the vast expanse of open, cultivated land that stretched out on either side of my route made it hard to believe I was on my way to a record-setting beaver colony. Then, about 40 kilometres from the outskirts of Nipawin, the asphalt gave way to gravel, and a long, straight fence that extended as far as I could see both north and south of the road brought the farm fields to an abrupt halt. East of the wire, trees took over — a phalanx of black spruce and tamarack, with flashes of balsam poplar and luminous white birch scattered among their dark ranks. I had entered the Northern Provincial Forest.
It was as if I had driven through a time warp and could suddenly see the land as it appeared to explorer Henry Kelsey when he passed this way in 1690, making history as the first European to enter present-day Saskatchewan. Beavers were plentiful throughout the region then, which was welcome news for Kelsey's employer, the Hudson's Bay Company. After that, it took the fur traders and trappers less than 200 years to wipe them out.
Although the dense forest obscured the lay of the land, the road's occasional undulations hinted at the "knoll and kettle" topography I had read about on Thie's website, and I could picture the depressions filled with fens and bogs. If Thie had been sitting in the passenger seat, he might have pointed out how the highway follows one of the beach lines left by ancient Lake Agassiz and explained how these prominent ice-age features slow the natural drainage. In his absence, my understanding of why the area is beaver heaven came down to this: because of the region's geology, the gently inclined land leading to Pakwaw Lake is one big soggy wetland, irrigated by runoff from the Pasquia Hills.
I was still 30 kilometres from my destination when the first fat raindrops hit my windshield. Minutes later, I was driving through a deluge. I cranked the wipers up to high and halved my speed as the road turned as soft and slippery as cream cheese beneath my tires. I didn't dare pull over onto the weedy strip that passed for a shoulder. If I were to slide into the deep ditch that separated the roadbed from the coniferous wilderness beyond, I might never be found. Except for one 18-wheeler that spewed rooster tails of mud at my little SUV as it roared by, heading west, traffic was nonexistent on this stretch of so-called highway. On the plus side, I was free to weave back and forth across both lanes, aiming for the shallowest trenches.
When I finally reached the Pakwaw Lake turnoff, about an hour after the rain started, it was still pouring. The intersection marked the centre of my target, but the only pond in sight showed no sign of beaver activity. I crept a few kilometres farther down the highway, hemmed in by stiff, scraggly spruce, then executed a cautious three-point turn in the thick sludge, drove back to the junction and turned right.
The storm had almost sputtered out by then, as had my hopes of finding the beavers. The structures that seemed so obvious from outer space were proving far more elusive at ground level. The terrain was too flat, the vegetation too thick, and there were no sign-posted trails leading to strategically located viewing platforms. I thought back to the warning a Saskatchewan Tourism rep had given me when I asked about travelling to the Pasquia Hills: "It's pretty wild country," she'd said. "I suppose that's why the beavers like it so much."
I drove slowly down the Pakwaw Lake road and through the village on unpaved and deserted streets — the downpour had apparently chased all the local citizens inside — and turned back towards the highway. Just then, I spotted a dark brown dome a few hundred metres from the road edge, rising out of what appeared to be a grassy meadow fringed with birch trees and tall shrubs. I cranked the wheel to pull over, wriggled into my hooded, face-veiling bug shirt and jumped out, binoculars and camera in hand. Instantly, hordes of mosquitoes and gnats descended upon me, pummelling the mesh around my head and blackening the thin fabric of my pants. Doing my best to ignore them, I started towards the lodge, only to discover that a wide, water-filled ditch blocked my route. There was no point getting wet to my knees wading across it. I was bound to hit deeper water before I got much closer. I could see now that the verdant meadow was an illusion, a marshy moat that afforded the lodge's tenants ample protection against terrestrial invaders like me.
Instead, I returned to the car for my Google Earth printouts. Bingo! The unreachable dome's position perfectly matched one of the pale dots on the photograph, proof that the satellites weren't lying, even if the rest of the lodges were out of sight. As I stood there studying the dome through my binoculars and savouring my success, a Cree man, the first person I had seen since I turned off the highway, drove by. From his baffled stare I gathered that the Beaver Capital of Canada was not yet a major tourist attraction.
It wasn't a particularly picturesque example of the beaver's art, but I snapped a few photos anyway, thinking of Horace T. Martin, author of the 1892 book, Castorologia, or The History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver. "The beaver lodge," wrote Martin, "is generally included in the list of marvels reserved for the investigation of those who visit beaver districts." That said, he did not recommend the experience, since "no greater disappointment awaits the enquirer than the first inspection of one ... [It] is a shock to stand for the first time before a pile of twigs, branches and logs, heaped in disorder on a small dome of mud, and to learn that this constitutes the famous lodge."
Of course, any nineteenth-century sightseer who had read early European accounts of life in North America was bound to be disappointed. The authors of those fanciful reports often represented beaver lodges as multi-storied and many-chambered tenements, designed with "the genius of a clever architect." The illustrators depicted crews of vaguely beaver-like quadrupeds marching along with bundles of lumber balanced on their shoulders, and many commentators displayed equal imagination in describing the beaver's building techniques. Charlevoix, among others, claimed that beavers used their tails as wheelbarrows to transport mud and as trowels to plaster it into onto the exterior walls of their "cabins."
Back in the car, accompanied by the multitude of biting insects that would torment me all the way to Nipawin and beyond, I brooded for a while about my failure to gain admission to the beaver's little Venice. However, by the time I reached the welcome firmness of the paved road, I had decided it didn't matter. The important thing was that such a place remained more than a century after Horace T. Martin's gloomy prognosis that, "As to the ultimate destruction of the beaver no possible question can exist."
Jean Thie's other major beaver discovery is the World's Longest Beaver Dam, which is more famous than the Beaver Capital of Canada and considerably less accessible. No roads lead to this natural wonder. There are no utility corridors or seismic cut lines to follow. No human footpaths either, though moose trails abound. The dam's location, in a remote corner of Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta, is a rarity within North America: undefiled, uninterrupted wilderness, where beavers live exactly the same way they did before Europeans reached the continent.
In 1797, while travelling across the prairies, David Thompson came to a beaver dam that was "a full mile in length" (1.6 kilometres, for the metrically inclined) and wide enough for his horses to walk two abreast. Coming from anyone else, this might seem like hyperbole, but given Thompson's renown as a surveyor, I trust his appraisal. Today, nothing like it exists. In fact, until Thie spotted the Wood Buffalo National Park dam in 2007, the record holder was a 652-metre-long edifice near Three Forks, Montana, documented around 1913 and long since vanished. Nobody has physically surveyed this new find, but Thie has measured it on satellite images. At 850 metres, it's about half as long as the one Thompson crossed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Once They Were Hats by Frances Backhouse. Copyright © 2015 Frances Backhouse. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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