Beavers are foundation block to the Farm and Garden’s creating a cultural and environmental history of the NW. History course cover Hispanic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, English, Chinese, French, and American explorer search for warming furs. This Peace Arch monument describes an 1818 Treaty between America and Britain
and an 1819 Treaty between Spain and the US, each ignoring the other along with Russian claims, but including implications to create “fur deserts” where beavers were “trapped to extinction” to discourage incursion by other groups. It worked! With few furs left to be harvested, Russia abandoned Fort Ross (65 north of San Francisco), selling the colony’s houses (to Sutter in 1841), and later selling Alaska to the US (Seward’s Folly). By 1847, the area west of the Rockies, including the Mexican enclaves of California, the English settlements north of the US border, and the Russians of Alaska held but 25,000 people … and perhaps 25,000 beaver remaining. And those few beavers and settlers lived among a Native Indigenous, whose far more numerous populations were plummeting by 90%. East of the Rockies (including Europe before widespread immunizations), babies then did not live to age 5 at a 1 in 4 rate and 2 in 4 were dead by puberty – a statistic unchanged from Roman times. For Native Indigenous babies battling European diseases, perhaps 1 in 100 babies lived to puberty with 8 in 10 adults dying around them. Death was commonplace, few worried about beavers … except for the Blackfeet and other tribes that prohibited their killing. It was a few trappers who came and went who changed the area west of the Rockies ecosystem, the inadvertent result of taking “beavers to extinction” for political and business reasons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSaJc6_Gdc8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Fur_Rush
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-flood-u-beavers-wolves-150926299.html
https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/fur_trade_in_oregon_country/#.Y7ec9i-B2Rs
https://www.newswise.com/articles/hudsons-bay-company-fur-trapping-policies-set-stage-for-modern-environmental-struggles
https://wetlandsconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/John-Whitman-Conservation-and-Fur-Deserts-FINAL.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuMRDZbrdXc
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-beavers-shaped-america-from-capitalism-to-climate-change/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSaJc6_Gdc8
Before immunizations, in Europe and the Americas, what percentage of babies died before they reached their teens?
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