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.