Oh Canada!

Just finished a reread of Eric Morse's Fur Trade Routes of Canada; Then and Now.  Just fascinating to think of it in both ecological and historical terms.  Canada, as a country, exists basically because of the fur trade and the main canoe routes from the fur country in the west and Montreal and York Factory literally shaped the country.  It's like a piece of ecological needle threading.  The routes had to go where the best beaver furs were.  Which means north because a cold beaver is a furry beaver.  The best furs came from the Athabaska country.  But, and it's a big but, the routes had to be ice free for long enough for the brigades to get hither and yon.  In practice even taking southerly routes, the route had to be split so that furs came east to a meeting point and trade goods came west and the crews swapped cargo and headed home before the winter set in.  The routes also had to be far enough south that it was possible to stock supply depots with food.  i.e. close, for the most part, to where buffalo were to be had in quantity.  Factor in all those things and it's easy to see that basically what is now Canada was that part of North America (west of Montreal) needed by the fur trade and why there were "Canadians" in the west long before the US had expanded beyond the Mississippi.