The Beaver, Vol. 1, No. 10, July, 1921

The Beaver was the Hudson's Bay Company's own magazine, a house organ that chronicled the inner workings of the oldest commercial enterprise in North America. This July 1921 issue offers an extraordinary time capsule: detailed accounts of the annual gathering of fur trading officers, the complex logistics of moving goods and pelts across thousands of miles of wilderness, and the quiet bureaucratic machinery that kept a vast trading empire running. Written by the men who actually lived it, these pages capture a world on the verge of transformation. The fur trade was waning, the automobile and airplane were arriving, and the old ways of doing business were being questioned. For historians and anyone fascinated by the romance of the North American frontier, this is a primary source of the first order. Here is the fur trade not as legend, but as lived experience, complete with shipping schedules, officer appointments, and the practical concerns of men working in some of the most remote places on the continent.