R. Grace Morgan’s posthumously published Beaver, Bison, Horse: The Traditional Knowledge and Ecology of the Northern Great Plains is a model of interdisciplinary research. Focusing her attention on the Canadian Northern Plains, more specifically the Qu’Appelle River Valley in the south of her native Saskatchewan Province, Morgan offers a sustained and nuanced examination of the complex interplay between native hunting practices and biannual migration patterns, inter-tribal relations, prairie and woodland types, waterways, fauna both native (beaver, bison, and others) and exotic (horse), and the incursion of European traders and trappers.
Morgan is concerned, to start, with a primary tension between woodland and prairie tribal groups. This primary tension pivots on a cultural prohibition against beaver hunting among prairie groups and a lack of the same in the woodlands. She considers this tension in the context of a scrupulously reconstructed pre-contact environment. The author’s contention is that the cultural injunction regarding beaver is based in the recognition of that creature’s central role in surface-water management, a role especially important in the plains, which are subject to broad seasonal variation in the availability of surface water and where there is relatively less surface water than in woodland areas.
Morgan moves seamlessly and compellingly among a wide variety of source materials, from her own archaeological and ecological work in the field, to geographical, ethnographic, anthropological, and environmental research published over a century and a half. She also draws on primary research materials such as land management bulletins and historical journals and correspondence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author deftly combines source material and original research in pursuit of a series of interlocking queries. How do the environmental impacts of beaver populations shape tribal behavior? What role did these impacts play in interactions between tribal groups and European trappers and traders (especially the Hudson’s Bay Company)? How did bison-hunting methods and herd-movement structure patterns of tribal migration and seasonal camp location? How did the rise of fur trapping change the relationships between native tribes and beaver? How did Native-European interactions impact inter-tribal relations? What impacts did the introduction of horses to previously pedestrian cultures have on all of the above?
Another key concern of the text is the various ways native tribes deployed sophisticated environmental knowledge to ensure subsistence. The use of fire will suffice as an example for the purposes of this review. Native peoples used controlled burns to a variety of ends. One use of burns among forest-dwelling peoples discussed in the text was in the maintenance of beaver meadows, which provided good grazing land, concentrating herbivores and thus facilitating hunting. The breaking of beaver dams and draining beaver ponds were initial to the creation of meadows. Soil conditions post-drainage were toxic to the growth of trees and shrubs. The lives of these meadows were extended using burns. Fire was an effective means of keeping beaver populations from returning to meadows, in that it retarded the growth of aspens, a central need for beaver populations. Alternately, as discussed by Morgan, plains-dwelling groups used fire to create superior forage for bison (burnt lands lead to higher nutritional values in new growth), thus making the bison’s movements more predictable, arguably even dictating that movement.
Morgan is also a clear guide to the emergence of the fur trade and the ways its focus on beaver pelts shaped interaction between native groups and Europeans and between the native groups themselves. The longstanding beaver-hunting practices among woodland tribes and the taboo against such hunting among prairie-dwelling peoples immediately shaped frequency and intensity of interaction between Native and European, with woodland tribes being more willing and able to provide desirable beaver pelts to traders while plains dwellers were less so. One way the author develops the implications of this divergent pattern is via consideration of how it led to a concentration of guns among tribal groups more engaged in the trading of beaver pelts, which had vital implications in the context of inter-tribal conflict.
The introduction of the horse is also ably tracked by the author. Morgan discusses how increased mobility led to changing patterns of bison hunting. Whereas earlier hunting practices (pounding and jumps) focused on minimally impacting herd movements, thus keeping herds relatively intact, mounted pursuit of bison was more dangerous for the hunter, and lent itself to the dispersal of herds over time. This dispersal both made herd movements over the seasons less predictable and redoubled the need for horses in the pursuit of increasingly scattered bison. Morgan further argues that horses exacerbated hostilities between tribal groups in that the extended range allowed by horses led to increased interaction and resource disputes. This increased hostility led, in turn, to an increased need for trade acquisition of guns and horses; tribal groups with no firearms and limited to pedestrian travel would be at a marked disadvantage. Given the clear preference for beaver pelts among European traders, the increasing need for trade goods among Natives, in turn, pressured them to trap beaver.
All the post-contact ramifying factors listed above led to the deterioration of longstanding practices and rapid depletion of natural resources. Morgan’s sustained discussion of native methods of land stewardship that had long sustained the ecosystem of which they were part is arguably central to Beaver, Bison, Horse’s importance. Cristina Eisenberg argues as much in her afterword, which is lent focus by Eisenberg’s concern with prairie restoration. Eisenberg’s afterword, and the inclusion of Morgan and Hudson’s “Dynamics of Fire and Grazing” as appendix, further recommend this volume to students and scholars of land use, ecology, Native anthropology, and colonial history.
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[Review length: 951 words • Review posted on October 13, 2023]