CASTOROLOGIA. IO7 



The exact details of this method of trading, form part of the re- 

 cords of an enquiry instituted many years ago, to ascertain how the 

 Hudson's Bay Company could do justice to the Indian, and still pay 

 dividends of over fifty per cent, per annum. It was explained that 

 the Company put only a fair advance on the cost laid down in each 

 " Post," " Fort" or " Factory" of all such goods as came under 

 the heading of necessaries ; but for luxuries they felt justified in 

 charging all the Indian could afford to pay, so that they did him no 

 injustice by taking a beaver skin, worth twelve shillings in ex- 

 change for a colored cotton handkerchief, which originally only cost 

 a couple of pennies. The records describe the mode of trading as 

 follows : 



"An Indian arriving at one of the Company's establishments 

 with a bundle of furs, which he intends to trade, proceeds, in the 

 first instance, to the trading room ; there the trader separates the 

 furs into lots, and, after adding up the amount, delivers to the In- 

 dian a number of little pieces of wood indicating the number of 

 made-beaver to which his hunt amounts. He is next taken to the 

 store room, where he finds himself surrounded by bales of blankets, 

 slop-coats, guns, knives, powder-horns, flints, axes, &c. Each ar- 

 ticle has a recognized value in made-beaver. A slop-coat, for ex- 

 ample, is twelve made-beavers, for which the Indian delivers up 

 twelve of his pieces of wood ; for a gun he gives twenty ; for a knife, 

 two ; and so on, until his stock of wooden cash is expended." 



" Made-beaver " and " whole-beaver " were local technical terms 

 employed to denote the fixed unit of the locality, and were asso- 

 ciated with beavers in the sense that a skin from an adult beaver, 

 prime in quality and in perfect condition was the actual unit or 

 "made-beaver," while in practice, beaver skins themselves were 

 converted into ' ' made-beavers, ' ' varying with the generosity of the 

 buyer or the demands of the seller, so that in some cases two small 

 beaver skins would equal only one ' ' made beaver. ' ' 



In some instances a difiBculty was experienced in arranging for 

 the fractional parts of the ' ' made-beaver, ' ' as the tally sticks or 



