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The following is excerpted from Barry Gough’s “Innis and Northern Canada: Fur Trade and Nation” in Harold Innis and the North, edited by William J. Buxton.
The beaver was a means for Innis to explain history. It was the subject of the staple trade as long as the beaver felt hat was in fashion (until about 1835). It was to Innis an amalgam of economic forces, human activity, and political organization. The beaver pelt was the currency of exchange, the meeting of European “civilization” with that of the Aboriginal peoples of North America, the focus of trade rivalry and corporate wars, the link between metropolis and far frontier, the driving force for new fields and districts of exploration, fort-building and local exploitation, the symbol of new trade allies. The trade was based on Aboriginal, indigenous needs; it linked European markets with interior fur posts and, even further, circuit traders who traded en derouine and freemen.
During the 1920s Innis kept up a steady pace in his fur-trade research, with regular trips to the Ottawa archives coupled with occasional summer expeditions to the North. The latter is the subject of other chapters in this volume. Even so, it is important to note here that, like Parkman and Trevelyan before him, Innis believed that history could not be written exclusively from archives and libraries. In 1924 he went to the Mackenzie River basin, travelled in an eighteen-foot canvas-covered Hudson Bay canoe on the Peace River for the first short leg and then, for the rest of the trip, on the Distributor, Liard River, and D.A. Thomas vessels. He studied the modes of transportation and the places of occupation and extraction. He saw the partnership of Canadian commerce and indigenous labour at first hand. He watched the industrial age creep north. As the historiographer Robin Winks wrote of Innis, the diary of that trip “infused life into the documents he studied so closely during the next five years. He repeatedly travelled thereafter to make certain he had the feel of a place before he wrote of it, for he knew that there are nuances of knowledge to be gained only by going to the spot and seeing with one’s own eyes.”
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