Soft Gold - Fur

eading up the Missouri River in 1805, for the last 85 miles or so below the mouth of the Marias, the men had noticed an increasing scarcity of beaver, partly owing to the decline in riparian timber through the breaks and the White Cliffs. That picture was to change drastically when the party reached the three forks of the Missouri. In 1806, Lewis would kill just one beaver during his five-day ramble up the Marias.

Nevertheless, although the golden age of the fur trade was ten years past when Fort Benton was established in 1850, furs remained the basis of its economy as a centrally located trading post for another couple of decades. The hottest commodities included not only beaver but also wolf, coyote, otter, marten, and fisher. A comment in the Fort Benton Illustrated Almanac in 1878 summarizes this transitional era.

Until the past three years [prior to 1878], the inhabitants of Benton were almost exclusively engaged in fur trading....While in some respects the fur trade was of great advantage to Benton, it was also a detriment to the welfare of the town. It furnished profitable and congenial employment to a large class of adventurous men, who squandered their earnings as rapidly as they received them, and this together with the money spent by the fur dealers who annually visited the town, and by travelers awaiting the arrival or departure of steamers, made trade good and cash plenty.

t was partly the continuing decline in the market for furs that caused the writer to use the past tense, but the animal population had also diminished considerably. Indeed, early in the 1880s the Montana Legislature enacted the Territory's first game law, prohibiting the trapping of beaver for a part of each year, primarily to preserve the animal as a commercial resource. The first authorized season for beaver trapping was established in 1895.

Beavers, however, are rodents, and as such are opportunistic and adaptable animals. They are survivors, subject to few predators other than humans. In places such as the C.M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, it is believed that their numbers today at least equal those in Lewis and Clark's era.

The main factor affecting beaver numbers now is the limit of tolerance of farmers and other landowners, even in suburban habitats, and trapping serves as the most practical management alternative. In the past few decades, annual beaver harvests in Montana alone have ranged from a low of 5,000 to a high of around 18,000. The total annual harvest in the USA ranges between 100,000 and 200,000.

--Joseph Mussulman, 10/98, rev. 11/04