BEAVER

The first white contact with indigenous people on the East Slope plains was made from the Canada side in the form of fur trappers, even before the explorers found Chief Mountain.  Their "life-style" was totally different from the nomadic villages of the Blackfeet.  

When the People lived off Buffalo, especially at first when the piskun was the main way of harvesting, they took everyone to the place of killing to do the work of processing the animal.  A grown buffalo weighs a thousand pounds and could not be moved, esp. before there were horses.  Later, when the killing was done on horseback and the carcass left behind the hunters, a dark mound in the grass, the women were tracking close behind and tackled the work in small groups, portable abbatoirs.  

It could take all day to gut, skin, and slice the meat into easily dried filets.  When there were horses, they loaded the travois with the material for drying racks.  Hides were split down the spine to make them possible to handle while still wet with blood and fat, so they could be stretched out on the ground or in frames to be scraped and worked to get the fibers loose and soft.  Those who try it today as a demonstration and exploration report that it is hard work.  

But the fur trappers smashed that culture like an egg, yet were not far from it.  The individuals were not necessarily white but often came from two unstable pools of men with cultures of their own: the military and the sea ships.  From almost every racial and national source, both sources were individuals with rough allegiance to a group and maybe a few close buddies.  They were used to hardship, mutilation and death.  It was rare for them to have families, but the whole webwork could include boys of many ages, who grew up in that context.  On the prairie they brought their own ideas: horses for lack of ships, weapons, and a daily allocation of "grog", as Western working men had required since medieval times.

They were two kinds of men: those who were mostly British Islanders with minimal educations, the kind that had been ship captains and port authorities, and who built forts to be their ports; and the kind who did the actual trapping and built small scattered log cabins to be their place to "dock".  The "factors" or heads of the forts kept order and made bookkeeping records, many of which are now available through the opening of the Hudson's Bay historical records.  They were sedentary but always kept the connection to their British masters far away because of their ability to write.

The trapper depended on a "trap line", a regular path marked by the setting of his steel spring traps in places where the water animals lived, since they had the best fur.  Beaver, otter, muskrat, marten, fisher, and even wolverine were trapped and carried back to cabins for processing, which meant warming carcasses enough to skin, stretching the skins on hoops or scabbards so as to remove fat and to dry, then storing them until Spring when they could be carried to the fort.  The pattern of the trapper's days was a hub with radiating paths, often along waterways.

The factor at the fort had a staff of men to help and might take in women to cook and clean.  The trapper in his cabin might hook up with a woman or several to be the crew of his "ship," to deal with the accumulating skins, to maintain tackle and clothing, to cook, and to accommodate whatever other needs he had.  No clergy as in settlements were there to criticize, insist on marriage or monogamy, try to baptize the children that were inevitable.  For some, "beaver" was affectionate slang for a winter's partner. 

Below is the conventional history of the fur trade, taken from Wikipedia:

"The North American fur trade was the industry and activities related to the acquisition, trade, exchange, and sale of animal furs in North America. Aboriginal peoples in Canada and Native Americans in the United States of different regions traded among themselves in the Pre-Columbian Era, but Europeans participated in the trade beginning from the time of their arrival in the New World and extended its reach to Europe. The French started trading in the 16th century, the English established trading posts on Hudson Bay in present-day Canada in the 17th century, and the Dutch had trade by the same time in New Netherland. The 19th-century North American fur trade, when the industry was at its peak of economic importance, involved the development of elaborate trade networks.

"The fur trade became one of the main economic ventures in North America attracting competition among the French, British, Dutch, Spanish, and Russians. Indeed, in the early history of the United States, capitalizing on this trade, and removing the British stranglehold over it, was seen as a major economic objective. Many Native American societies across the continent came to depend on the fur trade as their primary source of income. By the mid-1800s, however, changing fashions in Europe brought about a collapse in fur prices. The American Fur Company and some other companies failed. Many Native communities were plunged into long-term poverty and consequently lost much of the political influence they once had."

The removal of beaver, the results their work, and the dependent lives that used the ponds they created and were spared the destruction of the floods they prevented, even the loss of fertile small clearings of silted-up ponds, changed the world.  The wisdom of protecting such busy workers was only gradually realized.

At the time it was more interesting to learn the tricky plotting of how to trap.  The canoe and woodland peoples farther east had built up a field of expertise based on close observation of what animals do, where they go, what attracts them.  Baits and tricks were semi-military strategies.  It was almost more like fishing than anything mammal.  Romantic ideas about nature, even the miserable frozen world of snow and ice, combined with the American love of unsupervised solitude, shortened many lives.  

But when it was time for gathering into convocations like the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous that existed between 1825 and 1840, the trappers were joyous with drinking, eating, getting news, meeting old friends, gambling and the other pursuits of aging military or seaworthy men.  This is what groups like to pretend they are re-enacting -- with great nostalgia for something that never quite existed.