The fur trade had a strong impact upon the Beaver just as it did
with other tribes. They were considered to be very honest in
their dealings with traders. Little is known about how the
Beaver dressed before their contact with fur traders. They
pretty much had adopted European dress by the time sojourners and
homesteaders had arrived in the Peace River by the mid 19th
century. During the Klondike gold rush, the Beaver were particularly
victimized by the increased pressure on their game reserves and the
poisoning methods used by the Klondikers often killed their dogs.
The Dunne-za, perhaps more than any other tribe in the area,
suffered from the encroachment of white settlement. In 1838,
Tranquille, a respected warrior and hunter, worked for the Hudson Bay
Company (HBC) as a hunter at Fort Dunvegan. He was chief of a
band of roughly 30 to 40 and their main territory by the middle 1800s
was the grande prairie. In his declining years he was totally
blind and had to live off the charity of the HBC at Dunvegan. In
1893, he passed away at nearly 100 years of age and was buried at St.
Charles Mission.
At first the Dunne-za were reluctant to take treaty, and stayed
away during the initial negotiations in 1899. They finally
signed in 1900, but because they were widely scattered, the Beaver
required several adhesions to get many family groups signed onto the
treaty. Following the signing of Treaty 8, the Beaver did not
move immediately to their assigned reserves but continued for some years
their nomadic lifestyle. One of their small reserves near the
town of Peace River was exchanged for land closer to their hunting
territory.
Reprinted from "A Sense of the Peace," by
Roberta Hursey with permission of the Spirit of the Peace Museums
Association and the author. |