The Fur Business in
Eritish Columbia

When Capt. Meares Took His First Shipment of Sea Otter out of Nootka

Over One

*

By
‘CLIFFORD R. KOPAS

*

undred and Fifty Years Ago, He Laid the Foundation of British

Columbia’s Fur Trade—Now Mr. Kopas Brings Us Up to Date on Some Current

SKINNED!

Suddenly I had the vision of my pelt,
with its few whiskers and feeble growth
of hair being up for auction.

“The next lot is number 70,” I could
hear the auctioneer intoning. “There is
only one skin in this lot. I'll take a bid
of ten dollars for it. Alright” . . . as there
were no bidders at that figure... “I'll
take a bid of nine dollars. Alright, then
eight”.

His tone was emotionless. A skin was
a skin. He couldn’t allow himself to get
excited over my skin. He kept on his
monotonous chant.

He got a bid at eight dollars. The man
beside him at the pew-like desk saw one
of the buyers raise a pencil. Another
raised a hand.

“Up! Up!” the man barked as snappy
as a terrier with a racoon up a tree.

Each time he barked “Up!” the
auctioneer raised his price. He kept on
the monotonous chant.

“Eight-fifty I am bid. Any advance
on eight-fifty. (‘Up!’) Eight-seventy-
five I am bid. Any advance on eight-
seventy-five? You all through at eight-
seventy-five ?”

The auctioneer closed his eyes, aimed
and delivered a terrific blow at the rubber
pad on the table in front of him, and
when the hammer-blow resounded through
the room, my skin belonged to somebody
else.

Not much of a price! But then, not
much of a skin!

Of course the foregoing is fancy, but
this winter and spring many a fur-owner
awakened at fur auctions to realities that
were almost as grim. Silver-fox farmers
were left to go home to look at breeding
stock that suddenly had become less valu-
able than scrubby range cattle. Mink
farmers went home to wonder how they
were going to pay the meat bills created
by their fur-bearers.

The fur game is a gamble.

I had heard it before, but what one
hears only is sometimes apt to go in one
ear and out the other without much inter-
ference, without so much as a detour.

I had invested in furs. At least, I
thought it was an investment. Deep in the

SEVENTEENTH EDITION

Problems of the Fur Trader.

heart of the Coast Range white and In-
dian trappers had brought me pelts of
shimmering beauty for which I had ex-
changed good coin of the realm. Marten,
Mink, Muskrat, Beaver, Squirrels, Er-
mine and Otter had been bartered for
and bought.

It was part of the wealth that comes
every year out of the forests and fens,
the mountains and plateaus of British
Columbia in a profusion that no other

al trapper of the Canadian Coast Range, carry-
ing a pack that is difficult to even lift.
— Photo Clifford R. Kopas

province can approach. Out of the wilder-
ness comes a wealth of furs of the same
scintillating beauty that first tempted the
white man to conquer the vastnesses of
the Canadian hinterland.

TRAPPER STILL VITAL FOR Fur SUPPLY

While the coming of the fur-farmers
has brought a new colour to the picture

a
Pid
*

of fur-trading, the old romance and
glamour and hardships attend many fea-
tures of the fur business. While some
fur-bearers like Mink and Fox never
know the freedom of the great out-of-
doors, others like Marten and Weasel
have never yielded their wilderness rights.
No man has succeeded, from a financial
viewpoint, in raising these latter two in
pens. Hence every fall trappers go into
the woods loaded with traps, provisions,
ammunition. Some of them fly in with
chartered planes, some in the gentler rol-
ling country go in with pack-horses, but
the final work of getting furs is hard
mushing and back-packing.

Every winter countless trappers mush
through the snow-laden trees following
their traplines, setting, baiting, blazing,
making gruelling marches from cabin to
cabin, slugging along on snow-shoes, liv-
ing in poorly lit hovels, taking chances
of freezing to death, of any minor acci-
dent proving fatal. They pay a big price
for the share of shimmering wealth they
bring out.

And they gamble.

For when they outfit in the fall, paying
out good money for traps and food and
snow-shoes, they are not aware of the
prices they will receive for their furs in
the spring . . . or when they come out
during the winter. All the winds of chance
are play of the thermometers that dic-
tate the price of furs. Wars and financial
booms always shove the prices up: slack
times and depressions kick the props out
from under the fur-price structure. And
since it is such a luxurious luxury, furs
take the first shock of a dropping market.

This past winter showed a new factor
in the fur game, a factor that might have
a clammy, destructive hand on the North
American fur-breeder and wilderness
trapper. Fur prices in the early fall of
1946 were almost as high as in the pre-
ceeding spring, when almost any price
would be paid for furs. Then, with the
temporary drop in the stock market, and
the accumulated effeets of strikes or tie-
ups began to be felt, buyers of. furs be-
come hesitant. The ultimate consumer
was showing a certain apathy toward high
fur-coat prices; there was a glut of furs

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