From the Hudson's Bay Company to Parachuting Beavers

History, of course, is written by the victors.

And, in some cases, by researchers and writers who don’t hesitate to deliver a few delightful, backhanded gallantries at events big or small, at personages eminent or obscure, and at enterprises holy and grotesque.

Thus I read in Elizabeth Haroldsen Lovell’s “Benjamin Bonneville, Soldier of the American Frontier.”

Lovell takes some jabs at the Hudson’s Bay Company in the book.

On Page 66, this:

In their own bailiwick in Canada, the policy of Hudson’s Bay Company was to harvest judiciously, but of areas open to both Great Britain and the United States, company officials wrote “The country is a rich preserve of Beaver, which for political reasons we should endeavor to destroy as fast as possible.” Peter Skene Ogden and Joh Work with their Snake River brigades had obeyed orders, and by 1833 the results were painfully evident.

She also elicits a jab at the American mania for progress, seen today in the likes of SpaceX and Silicon Valley and such ilk. On Page 118:

The country had gone mad with railroad building. Earlier, it had been canals, but even before many waterway projects were off the drawing boards there was talk they would soon be made obsolete by the railroads. To get somewhere quickly was an obsession which grew in America as naturally as hickory and maize, only faster. It was a stylish thing to “go by the cars.” Engines glistened with bright paint; passengers cars made up a “brigade.”

Lovell tells Bonneville’s tale well, intermixed with an excellent smattering of history much more broad than the soldier/adventurer’s life.

I picked up this book at a local thrift store and enjoyed reading it, seeing as I live in a county that bears Bonneville’s name. The book may be a little dry at times, but Lovell does her best to bring in livelier bits and to help us see one man’s story in context with the growth and growing pains of a nation.

And her stabs at Hudson’s Bay Company were comic.

Puts the parachuting beavers of the 1940s into some interesting historical context.