CHAPTER 3
As Told By the Trappers
…over 23,418,109 animals destroyed for their pelts and furs, besides 19,233 swans, in four years.J. HENRY BROWN.
David Douglas, the early botanist, said there was not an official in the Hudson's Bay Company with "a soul above a beaver-skin."
If Dr. John McLoughlin had been fond of reading poetry, which from the Scotch in him he ought to have been, his warm adherents among the historians would not have left us so much in the dark about it. Not a great deal has been said about a pipe-and-book side of him, and a solicitude to get reading matter to employes at lonely posts is not included in the long inventories of his benevolences. The first circulating library on the Pacific Coast was established by Dr. Tolmie and Donald Manson, not by Dr. McLoughlin; and at the northern posts, not at Fort Vancouver.
In the contemporary descriptions of the old Fort or in the accounts of historians, one cannot help being impressed by the relatively scant reference to books and reading, and in general to the kind of subjective life lived there. We are told that "the annual ship brought books, reviews, and files of newspapers" and there are occasional brief sidelights to indicate that this material was sometimes read, but no picture of any simultaneous and eager grabbing for it when it first arrived, not a single revealing incident like that of the young Mountain Man who came to the camp of Mrs. Whitman and Mrs. Spalding in the Snake River country and asked "if they had any books to sell, or they could spare."
