back
43 comments
It's funny to me, a Canadian, that this even warrants a did-you-know article because everything about the beaver fur/hat making industry is something I learned extensively about in elementary and high school because it was like, a major driver of the European exploration and colonization and therefore significant to the history of my country.

But outside of here it's just a footnote to a fashion trend.

In the Canadian bush, you'll run into people still running beaver traplines. From what I hear it's mostly for nuisance control since pelt prices are quite low. When I was talking to trappers, they seemed to imply that the government sets prices and buys them like as a cartel, but I'm not sure what the process is or if I understood correctly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapline#Registered_traplines

I think a lot of is that traplines are a property right that will go away if they aren't inherited. So people use them because they inherited them.
Thanks for sharing this discrepancy!

Indeed, the "beaver as relevant tool as major driver" does actually not exist in schools in EU mainland; the chance is higher you hear about the porks brought by first European-immigrants that they used for food production because of their fast reproduction numbers.

(and porks are easy to deal with, they eat everything; Once I heard someone from crime enforcement saying: "the perfect murdery would be to feed the dead body to a herd of porks because they would even eat the teeth from the body")

In English, the creature is a pig or a hog, and the meat is pork.

We also have major feral pig problems in parts of the US.

I’ve found it interesting that cows become beef, sheep mutton, pigs pork, but goats, chicken, turkeys and fish keep their identities when they become food.
> After the Norman Conquest of England, nobles referred to the meat they ate in French, but the peasants who raised animals for meat referred to them in Anglo-Saxon. This is why modern English has words such as beef and pork for meat, but cow and pig for the animals it comes from

I guess fish/chicken were for peasants at the time

The movie "Snatch"

https://youtu.be/_Yvmg4wcfzY?is=paeV1wjPaF2c6WZB

So, is it about Beaver or Pork then? :-D
Not that perfect. The canadian pig-farming serial killer was eventually caught.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pickton

thanks for the link!
We learned about it here in Minnesota, too! But I suppose we are about as close to Canadian as you can get without actually crossing the border.
Some people speculate that the USA gained control of Oregon country in large part because Canadians/Brits trading in beaver furs had to send all their pelts back to the UK before they could go out to the rest of the world. America just sailed from Boston to the PNW, traded for pelts and went directly to, say, China. Much faster, and cheaper too.
What was stopping the British from taking their pelts directly across the Pacific? It can't have been American control of the region if this is the explanation for how America got control of the region.

Spain certainly wasn't exporting silver from the New World to Europe before shipping it on to China; they shipped it directly there.

I guess it depends on what you call the new world, but for what it's worth that's not quite correct, the main transit point was Manila.

In true pedantic HN fashion I am currently vacationing on the west coast of Mexico and learned this fact yesterday.

> the main transit point was Manila.

Also explored in detail in Neal Stephensons "Cryptonomicon"

That's a good question. The British were definitely engaging in a very, very lucrative trade in sea otter pelts from the NW Coast of British Columbia, trading direct to Macau, and the Boston Men/USA got in on that as well over time.

Plausibly some agency (Hudson Bay company?) had a monopoly on beaver trade and this did not apply to sea otter, or maybe the story isn't quite right or there were other economic reasons why beavers to Asia as a concept wasn't exploited.

Beavers are big in canadiana but only Oregon put one on its flag, albeit on the back.
What such a hat looks like:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_beaver_hat_-_D...

So it's a top hat? Or not?
Yes, top hats were one (but not the only) use of beaver fur
That is a top hat, yes.
The other interesting but useless fact is that silk top hats (which as the article points out supersede beaver as the fibre of choice) are no longer made - and the technique for making them is effectively lost because they need specialised looms which are also no longer made.

But if you want to go somewhere super fancy like Ascot and look the part, a silk top hat is de rigueur.

There are now a handful of shops that basically have the entire remaining (good) stock and rent them out for an arm and a leg, and take care of them like rare precious things. Which I guess they are.

I was offered a new silk topper when I bought my last Montecristo at Locke & Co. The right corded silk is in rare supply, not the skill.

They asked under £2,000 (not that much more than my Panama) and I was a fool for not taking them up on it.

Very few people are buying Toppers and most people inherit their’s. The British upper classes do not see spending money as proof of anything but foolishness. Extant hats can be repaired and reblocked. Signs of age are not shameful among people who are not nouveau riche.

The market for new hats is tiny. Most sold are plastic and those buying them are none the wiser and appreciate the robustness.

It looks like silk top hats were still being made in the 60s so presumably it might still be possible to find people that worked in the factory and recover the knowledge if people really cared.
Possibly but the 60s is a very long time ago now… My parents were both adept in Fortran in the 60s when they were in their twenties but now in their mid-eighties I doubt they would be much good at helping someone who wanted to problem solve anything using Fortran!
But restoring knowledge is against value extracymtivism so not worth it at all.
> Factory workers soaked the skins in a orange-coloured solution containing mercuric nitrate; a process called 'carroting'. Vapours from the mercury poisoned the workers' nervous systems, making them prone to tremors, irritability, depression, paranoia, dementia and worse.

This is where the Mad Hatter in Alice Through the Looking-Glass comes from.

One wonders just how badly contaminated the building and local groundwater might be.
If you're interested in learning more about the ecological impact of beavers, I highly recommend "Three Against The Wilderness" by Eric Collier. He homesteaded in BC in the 1930s-60s and encouraged the re-introduction of beavers after being on the brink of extinction here.
Hopefully Buc-ee's doesn't decide to sue them too for trademark infringement.
Buc-ee's also owns all logos with circular yellow backgrounds in the entire world. /s

(Arch "Beaver" Aplin III is total wanker because he doesn't understand public relations or the Streisand effect in the slightest.)

The flag of New York City also features beavers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_New_York_City

Edit: it's clearer in the seal of the city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_New_York_City

The Astor Place subway station also contains several beaver tiles / bas-reliefs, because John Jacob Astor made his fortune with beaver pelts. EDIT: see https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/beavers-john-jacob-astor
My daughter once spent a bunch of time going through all the flag emojis classifying them as stars, animals, trees, religious symbols (and probably some others). We found three flags with maps. Animals were almost exclusively birds, but there was also a sheep, a pair of lions, seahorses, a lobster and a conch.
Kosovo and Cyprus... what was the third?
The Flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina has a triangle on it that is meant to represent the shape of the country (roughly).
Because they want to be sued by Buc-ee's for trademark infringement in a completely different country. ;B

See also: https://buc-off.com

A movie related to beaver hunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h4P-26kHAw
Perhaps it's only because we wiped them out so many places that we understand in the slightest the ecological role they play
$1.2 Million worth of wetland restoration and years of ecological revue skipped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver-engineered_dam_in_the_C...
I think if we hadn't we would've figured it out anyway. Someone would have found them interesting enough to study.
You think nobody found them interesting enough to study when they were being made into hats?

It's hard to raise the alarm about a harm that has not yet come to pass