09/26/2025
DID YOU KNOW? In the early fur trade, French, English, and Dutch merchants shipped tens of thousands of beaver skins every year. As demand grew, they pushed deeper inland and harvested even more aggressively. During the 1700s, yearly exports almost never fell below 100,000 pelts, and in some years they may have exceeded 300,000. The real crisis, however, wasn’t just the sheer numbers taken. It was the relentless expansion of the fur trade itself—erasing entire beaver populations from regions as fast as explorers and mapmakers could chart them. The animal simply couldn’t withstand the combination of European tools and unchecked exploitation.
By the turn of the 20th century, beavers had nearly vanished south of the forty-ninth parallel and from large parts of Canada. Records from Rupert House, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s oldest trading post, illustrate how severe the decline had become. During the winter of 1928–29, trappers combed some 25,000 square kilometers around James Bay, yet their entire haul amounted to only four beaver pelts.
What species is most abundant in your area today?
PC: Canadian Geographic
