In disposition the beaver was gentle and shy. When caught very young, they became perfectly tame and contented. Native women sometimes nursed young captives as they would a child, till, in a few weeks, they were old enough to eat bark, when they would wean themselves. Their cry resembled that of a human infant, and their affectionate natures made them attractive and satisfactory pets. Full growth was attained at two and one-half years, and they died of old age at about fifteen. A beaver family consisted of the two parents and the several offspring under two years of age, all living in one lodge or burrow. Occasionally a male refused to pair, and then after the second season he was driven from the colony and became an outcast. Their interesting social organisation and general sagacity placed them in the very top rank among animals.
This small creature, then, that offered its life as a bait to entice the white man into the depths of the wilderness, was one of the most remarkable on the continent, and its likeness, as the emblem of the American Republic, would be far more appropriate than the carrion eagle, which has little to commend it, as compared with the beaver, the model of gentleness, industry, ingenuity, and painstaking skill, and which formed a stepping-stone to the power and greatness of the Union of States now spreading from ocean to ocean.
CHAPTER III
A Monarch of the Plains—The Hunchback Cows of Cibola—A Boon to the Frontiersman—Wide Range of the Bison—Marrow Bones for the Epicure—Washington Irving a Buffalo Hunter—The Rushing Run of the Bison Herd—The Sacred White Buffalo Cow Skin—A Calf with a Bull Head—Wolves and White Bears.
Another denizen of the wilderness that performed an important part in its preparation for occupation by the white race was the buffalo or Bison Americanus, a monarch of the plains, huge and fierce in appearance; a monarch with the mien of a lion and the resistance of a sheep; an animal quite the opposite of the interesting beaver in almost every particular but numbers. In this respect, however, it vied with its smaller associate, roaming by millions and millions up and down across the limitless prairie-ocean, apparently as inexhaustible as the vagrant breezes blowing one day here and one day there. But the breezes still waft above the billowy surface, while the bison has vanished like a dream. The farm, the ranch, the town, and the railway now claim his vast grazing grounds. Were it not for a few specimens preserved in private herds and zoölogical gardens, this strange creature would be as unfamiliar to us in the life as are the Dinosaurs of the Jurassic plains.
The Monarch of the Plains.