In Beaver World

by Enos A. Mills

The beaver has been found in fossil both in Europe and in America. Remnants of the dugout and the teeth of beaver, together with rude stone implements of primitive man, have been found in England. Near Albany, New York, gnawed beaver wood and the remains of a mastodon were dug up from about forty feet below the surface in sediment and river ooze. Fossil beaver were of enormous size.

Coming down to comparatively modern times, the animal as we now know him appears to have been distributed over almost all Asia, Europe, and North America. There was no marked difference in the individuals that inhabited these three continents. The beaver is probably extinct in Europe, but in July, 1900, I found a piece of wood floating in the Seine that had been recently gnawed by a beaver. At this time I was assured that not even a tame beaver could be found in Europe. It is still found in parts of Siberia and Central Asia. That form which inhabits South America is very unlike those in the Northern Hemisphere, and may be called a link between the muskrat and the beaver.

Reference is made to the beaver in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Herodotus makes repeated mention of it. Pliny also gives a brief account of this animal. In Germany, in 1103, the right of hunting beaver was conferred along with other special hunting privileges; and a bull of Pope Lucius III, in 1182, gave to a monastery all the beaver found within the bounds of its property. A royal edict issued at Berlin in March, 1725, insisted upon the protection of beaver.

Before the white man came, beaver—Castor canadensis—were widely distributed over North America, perhaps more widely than any other animal. The beaver population was large, and probably was densest to the southwest of Hudson Bay and around the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia rivers. Their scantiest population areas in the United States appear to have been southern Florida and the lower Mississippi Valley. This scantiness is attributed by early explorers to the aggressiveness of the alligators. All the southern half of Mexico appears to have been without a beaver population; but elsewhere over North America, wherever there were deciduous trees and water, and in a few treeless places where there were only water and grass, the beaver were found. Along the thousands of smaller streams throughout North America there was colony after colony, dam after dam, in close succession, as many as three hundred beaver ponds to the mile. Lewis and Clark mention the fact that near the Three Forks, Montana, the streams stretched away in a succession of beaver ponds as far as the eye could reach. The statements made by the early explorers, settlers, and trappers, together with my own observations,—which commenced in 1885, and which have extended pretty well over the country from northern Mexico into Alaska,—lead to the conclusion that the beaver population of North America at the beginning of the seventeenth century was upwards of one hundred million. The area occupied was approximately six million square miles, and probably two hundred beaver population per square mile would be a conservative number for the general average.

In the United States there are a number of counties and more than one hundred streams and lakes named for the beaver; upwards of fifty post-offices are plain Beaver, Beaver Pond, Beaver Meadow, or some other combination that proclaims the former prevalence of this widely distributed builder. The beaver is the national emblematic animal of Canada, and there, too, numerous post-offices, lakes, and streams are named for the beaver.

BEAVER PONDS

Beaver skins lured the hunter and trapper over all American wilds. These skins were one of the earliest mediums of exchange among the settlers of North America. For two hundred years they were one of the most important exports, and for a longer time they were also the chief commodity of trade on the frontier. A beaver skin was not only the standard by which other skins were measured in value, but also the standard of value by which guns, sugar, cattle, hatchets, and clothing were measured. Though freely used by the early settlers for clothing, they were especially valuable as raw material for the manufacture of hats, and for this purpose were largely exported.