How Did European Beavers Affect The American Society

In many ways, colonists and Europeans acted as agents of change to early America. At the time when Columbus arrived, and in the years following, the American continent was a type of natural paradise compared to the highly inhabited and structured countries of Europe that explorers had come from. While the abundance of resources did influence the way in which Europeans treated the land, the predetermined economic mindsets carried over from a more resource-deprived Europe worked simultaneously to promote a general attitude of disrespect and overuse of nature in America. This complicated yet intertwined relationship between ecology and economics set a precedent in the New World that established an unsustainable reliance on natural goods to promote the European standard of wealth. Under those circumstances, the exploitation of American beaver and bison populations provides concrete, albeit incomplete, examples that can be explored to reveal how the increasingly capitalistic attitudes of Americans, both Euro and Native, lead to an
While they had hunted beavers strictly for practicality before Europeans arrived, they traded excessive amounts of beaver pelts to Euro Americans in the fur trade. Due to a rapidly declining population from introduced diseases and the desire of foreign manufactured goods, such as addictive alcohol and cooking utensils, Native Americans were forced by the market to act as middlemen in the fur trade.3 This shift in perspective is notable because it exemplifies the ability of the market to commodify a natural resource and to motivate people to participate in a society founded on material affluence. Native Americans became tempted by the values of a capitalistic society and engaged an economy that ran on a concept of wealth they did not understand, and this allowed them to see the value of America’s ample resources differently than they