American Beaver
Castor canadensis
Built the fur trade that built the colonies. The colonies returned the favor by 1900.
The Castor canadensis powered an entire continental economy — the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Astor fortune, the French and Indian War — because European men wanted felt hats. By 1900 the beaver had been trapped to the edge of extinction in nearly all of its original range. Felt hats, meanwhile, had gone out of fashion. The dam-building engineer of the American landscape was nearly erased by a millinery trend.
