Beaver, Bison, Horse: The Traditional Knowledge and Ecology of the Northern Great Plains

Abstract

In the early 1990s Grace Morgan’s PhD dissertation was a topic of considerable discussion at the University of Montana, where I had just arrived to work with students in environmental history, Native American history, and the American West. Morgan had answered a fundamental question in the history of the northern West. In the heyday of the fur trade, had the Native peoples of that region actually destroyed beaver—as so many peoples across much of America had done—to exchange for the goods of the Industrial Revolution? The answer from her research in Saskatchewan was a fairly definitive no, and the explanation, as my students and I discussed it, rested on the role beavers played in the ecology of the northern plains. Native people had long understood that in an arid landscape beavers often created and preserved the only dependable water available for travelers. No matter how much pressure European traders applied, groups like the Cree and Blackfoot bands knew better than to undermine a critical ecology that beavers alone maintained.Morgan passed away in 2016. Through the press of her career or some other inattention she never took her dissertation into print, an oversight this 2020 volume finally rectifies. One of the liabilities of Beaver, Bison, Horse, then, is that it rests largely on fieldwork and literature from the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet, reading this volume, somehow that does not seem to date it or detract significantly from it now. Because Morgan was an original thinker and a probing researcher (her field work largely focused on Qu’Appelle River Valley in Saskatchewan), this monograph from thirty years ago nonetheless is well worth spending time with and absorbing.The gist of Morgan’s insights come down to the following. Unlike First Nations peoples in the woodlands, whose absorption into the market economy via killing beaver for the fur trade is so well documented, people on the arid plains refused because of spiritual and ecological reasons. That did not mean, however, that they managed to avoid incorporation into the market. Instead, prairie groups focused their trade on wolf pelts, which in some respects is as surprising as their refusal to kill beavers. Later, when horses made it possible, bison robes pushed wolves into a secondary role. Morgan’s castigation of the lure of firearms in the trade, or even the role that luxury goods played, was not new in the early 1990s and isn’t now. But she is more negative about the transformation horses wrought on Native life than I expected. In my view her most useful addition to knowledge was her archaeological work in reconstructing the pre-horse seasonal movements of people on the northern plains as they followed bison into river valleys in the winter then used fire to lure the animals to open country advantageous for drives and jumps in the summertime. She renders that pattern vividly.James Daschuk was one of Morgan’s students and wrote the foreword here, and Cristina Eisenberg, an ecologist who identifies herself as “mixed Indigenous,” authored the afterword. They do an admirable job translating Morgan’s work into contemporary efforts on the part of both ecologists and tribes to restore beavers, bison, and wolves to twenty-first-century America. This, they argue—and I couldn’t agree more—is one of our principal modern tasks. For five centuries Old World cultures ignored American distinctiveness and moved heaven and earth trying to remake North America in the image of Europe. The myopia involved in that was epic.