Beaver Club

The Beaver Club was a gentleman's dining club founded in 1785 by the mostly English speaking fur-trading 'barons' of Montreal. According to the club's rules, the object of their meeting was "to bring together, at stated periods during the winter season, a set of men highly respectable in society, who had passed their best days in a savage country and had encountered the difficulties and dangers incident to a pursuit of the fur trade of Canada". Only fragmentary records remain of their meetings, but from these it is clear that the Beaver Club was "an animated expression of the esprit de corps of the North West Company". The men of the Beaver Club were the predecessors of Montreal's Square Milers.

In 18th century North America, the fur 'barons' of Montreal might only have been compared to the tobacco 'lords' of Virginia for their wealth and grand style of living. The members of the Beaver Club were bon viveurs, renowned for the Scottish Highland hospitality they offered to their guests and for the jovial, rollicking behaviour that carried on at their meetings. In his entertaining book The Shoe and Canoe, the English geologist, John Bigsby, relates the character of these Montreal fur traders in their early days:

A number of young men, chiefly of good Scotch families, able, daring, and somewhat reckless perhaps (a typical example being John MacDonald of Garth), formed themselves into a company (the North West Company) in order to traffic in the forbidden land (owned by the Hudson's Bay Company) despite of the character.

A first-rate Indian trader is no ordinary man. He is a soldier-merchant, and unites the gallantry of the one with the shrewdness of the other. Montreal was then the best place for seeing this class of persons.. They spend fast, play all the freaks, pranks, and street-fooleries, and originate all the current whimsicalities: but this is their brief holiday: when they turn their faces westward, up stream, their manners change.

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