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One-half of it, roughly, was covered with giant forests inhabited by fur-bearing animals with opulence upon their backs. One-half was covered with vegetation, varying from the luxuriant prairie grass to the sage-brush of the shadeless plains, plains roamed by beasts clothed with valuable robes.
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the name stood for a huge stretch of littoral, running southward from lands of long winters and fur-bearing animals to lands of the canebrake, the fig, the magnolia, the chameleon, and the mockingbird.
All the more notable fur-bearing animals, as the fox, the beaver, the otter, have doubtless been persecuted by man and his savage ancestors for tens of thousands of years, and their suspicion of traps and lures, and their skill in eluding them, are the accumulated inheritance of ages.
Of the fur-bearing animals, "the precious ermine," so called by way of preeminence, is found, of the best quality, only in the cold regions of Europe and Asia. * Its fur is of the most perfect whiteness, except the tip of its tail, which is of a brilliant shining black.
Now, about the time that George Washington was thinking of becoming a sailor, some of the rich planters in Virginia began to hear wonderful stories about a fertile region west of the Alleghanies, watered by a noble river, and rich in game and fur-bearing animals.
"We were given up for dead," says the historian, "and the property we left in Kamchatka had been appropriated by strangers." The reports concerning the abundance of fur-bearing animals on Bering's Island and elsewhere, induced private parties to go in search of profit. Various expeditions were fitted out in ships of clumsy construction and bad sailing qualities.
So while Canada resents being regarded as a fur land, her domain of the North sends down something more than roaring winds though winds are good things to shake dead leaves off the soul as well as off trees. Her domain of the North rears more than fur-bearing animals.
As might have been expected, the hunters of the moose, reindeer, black bears, and other large animals that wander over immense districts had the right of following them in any direction. The hunters and trappers of the rich fur-bearing animals, however, generally kept in certain regions year after year.
And all the time for her, as well as for man, calves and lambs are being emasculated to make her meat succulent; wild animals are painfully done to death to provide her table with delicacies; birds with young in the nest are shot so that she may parade in their plumage; or fur-bearing animals are for her comfort and adornment massacred and tortured in traps.
Napoléon Comeau, not to mention previous writers, like Packard, McLean and Cartwright a whole host of original authorities. But their work has never been thoroughly co-ordinated from a zoological point of view. A form of sanctuary suggested for the fur-bearing Yukon is well worth considering.
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