SOURCE: Saum, Lewis O. “The Fur Trader and the Noble Savage”. American Quarterly 15 (1963): 554-71.

In the following essay, Saum examines the writings of the fur traders of North America, many of which portray natives as being corrupted by European settlers.

In narrating his experiences in the Far-North as trader and explorer, Samuel Hearne of the Hudson's Bay Company included a lengthy treatment of that fascinating animal, the beaver. In doing so, “honest old Hearne,” as a nineteenth-century bibliographer called him,¹ felt the obligation to temper glowing accounts of the beaver written by people with inadequate knowledge. According to him, they greatly overestimated the organizational ability, sagacity and ingenuity of this remarkable creature. Because such exaggerations were often so pronounced, Hearne playfully suggested the existence of an open competition among their perpetrators in devising falsehoods. According to Hearne, one unnamed author clearly outdid his fellows by leaving nothing to...