This post is the fourth in a series marking the 50th anniversary of the passing of Bill C-373, “An Act to provide for the recognition of the Beaver (Castor canadensis) as a symbol of the sovereignty of the Dominion of Canada.”
Fifty years ago this week, the beaver was declared by Parliament to be an “official” symbol of Canada. The beaver’s industrious nature and ability to modify its surroundings have made it an easy analog for Canadians seeking home-grown symbols, and its centrality to the fur trade made for a convenient connection to settler history.
But beavers are also engineers. They are literally “ecosystem engineers,” organisms that modulate access to resources for other species by changing their environment.[1] Subsequently, they have been embraced by engineers; the beaver was adopted as the mascot of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1914, and Caltech did the same in 1921.
In the Canadian context, engineering and beavers come together in the de Havilland Canada DHC-2 “Beaver,” a single engine propeller-powered aircraft best known for its versatility and short take-off and landing (STOL) capabilities. It’s easily one of Canada’s most famous beavers and was declared one of the country’s 10 greatest engineering achievements during the centennial of professional engineering in Canada in 1987.[2] “If the French gave the world haute cuisine, the Italians opera, and the British the language of Shakespeare and Milton,” aviation historian Peter Pigott has claimed, “Canada’s contribution to civilization is undoubtedly the de Havilland Beaver.”[3]
In the interwar period, much of the aviation industry in Canada was oriented towards “bush flying:” surveying mostly for the purposes of mineral extraction and supporting that mineral extraction by transporting people, supplies, mail, and medicines to and from emerging mining communities. The first “bush planes” in Canada were surplus aircraft from the first World War, but by the late 1920s there was a robust purpose-built bush plane industry. Canada was therefore poised to manufacture Allied aircraft during the second World War. Although the scale increased significantly—over 16,000 aircraft were produced in Canada in wartime—the bush flying industry meant that there was already technological capacity and infrastructure in place.
The de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver was and old-fashioned bush plane for a new era. It was developed as part of a competition for a contract with the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests in the winter of 1946-47. In the war’s waning moments, Canadian aviation manufacturers such as de Havilland Canada recognized that they would likely lose their military contracts and saw the nation’s aging bush plane fleet as a new focus. Despite a deliberate pivot away from military needs, as Randall Wakelam has recently pointed out, the Beaver “did come to the attention of the US Air Force and Army…for their light transport and extreme short landing capabilities.”[4] It was the first time since the war ended that the US military had looked outside its borders for new aircraft, and delivery was delayed until 1951 due to restrictions from the “Buy America Act.” This caused something of a minor scandal in engineering and policy wonk circles; the Beaver was the “pride of the bushwhacking backwood operators among our northern cousins,” as the American magazine Flying explained, and it had managed to beat out all American options. Some of this was because, unlike many of the competitors, Beavers were a ready-to-go off-the-shelf model. But it was also because of their purpose-built “bush flying” character; it was “one of the very few airplanes specifically designed for, and even by, those who buy and fly them,” a bush pilot’s bush plane.[5]
Ten years later, the US Army and Air Force received their 968th Beaver; approximately 60% of all Beavers manufactured went to the United States. Known colloquially as the “flying jeep,” by the mid-1960s, air forces from Indonesia to Panama were flying Beavers. Canadians, of course, used (and continue to use) them everywhere too, particularly in small regional airlines such as Central British Columbia Airways, which bought the initial 1947 prototype now on display at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa.
“It was the right airplane at the right time,” historian Fred Hotson has said in his history of de Havilland Canada; to mix animal metaphors, it was the very definition of a workhorse.[6] Beavers were used in operations from both polar regions to the equator, fitted with wheels, pontoons, and skis, and hauled everything “from oil drums to pregnant women,” as Popular Science magazine suggested in 1949.[7] They look like workhorses, too; all-metal construction, a rugged, boxy-looking fuselage, a functional high-wing orientation, and hydraulic controls. There were seats for up to seven people, plenty of room for cargo, and easy access to fuel storage for bush-flying emergencies.[8] This was an airplane that felt like it had been custom-engineered for Canadian environments, because it had been.
It is here that we return to the actual beaver. De Havilland Canada named essentially all of its aircraft after animals in this period; the trainer it was manufacturing before the Beaver was called the “Chipmunk,” and the Beaver’s successors were the “Otter,” “Caribou,” and “Buffalo.” However, there was clearly something about the Beaver (and the beaver) that captured the Canadian airborne imagination. The RCAF did, in fact, seek a new transport at the end of the war—the de Havilland Canada Beavers would simply have been too small—and they ended up with the Canadair DC-4M “Beaver.” This aircraft was re-named the “North Star” in the summer of 1946 before its first public test flight. Trans-Canada Air Lines (now Air Canada) also used Canadair North Stars, and a story about the then-unnamed airliner in the Toronto Star prompted scores of unsolicited suggestions. The most common word among them was “Beaver,” including variations such as “Beaver Airlines” and “Flying Beaver.”[9]
Why was there such eagerness to attach the name “Beaver” to airplanes in the 1940s? Perhaps it was the way that both beavers and airplanes had physically shaped Canadian landscapes on the one hand and acted as staples of Canadian industry on the other. The bush flying industry made the allegedly impenetrable Canadian Arctic and sub-Arctic legible to the settler Canadian state, not entirely dissimilar to the way that the fur trade made the Canadian west make sense centuries earlier. But it may simply be, as the story of making the beaver a “official” symbol of Canada suggests, because it seemed natural. It made sense to praise beavers, airplanes, and general engineering ability in the same breath. And it made sense to attribute all three of those to Canada and Canadians. Just like the beaver, the Beaver was an ecosystem engineer, managing challenging landscapes in a literal and figurative ways.
[1] Clive Jones et. al. “Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers,” Oikos 69:3 (1994), 373-386.
[2] Other engineering achievements were the St. Lawrence Seaway, CANDU nuclear power system, the Alouette satellite, and the Bombardier snowmobile. Andrew Wilson, “Engineering Centennial and Achievements,” Engineering Institute of Canada Historical Notes and Papers Archive, 2017. It’s worth noting that the logo of the Engineering Institute of Canada, established in 1887, is a beaver.
[3] Peter Pigott, Taming the Skies: A Celebration of Canadian Flight. (Hounslow, 2003), 139.
[4] Randall Wakelam, “The Royal Canadian Air Force and the Military-Industrial Complex” in Silent Partners: The Origins and Influence of Canada’s Military-Indstrial Complex, edited by Alex Souchen and Matthew Wiseman (UBC Press, 2023), 196.
[5] R. G. Naugle, “The Air Force buys a Plane,” Flying Magazine, April 1952, 34, 64.
[6] Fred Hotson, The de Havilland Canada Story (CanAv Books, 1983), 102.
[7] Volta Torrey, “Plush Job for the Bush,” Popular Science, November 1949, 154.
[8] Hotson, The de Havilland Canada Story, 106-108.
[9] Letter from Herbert Symington to C. D. Howe, 18 June 1946, C. D. Howe fonds, MG027 B20, vol. 94, LAC; Letter from Bill English to Herbert Symington, 19 October 1946, Office of the President papers, Air Canada fonds, RG-70, volume 16, LAC.
