Part 3

Extensive autumn rambles in the mountains with especial attention to beaver customs compels me to conclude that as a basis for weather prediction beaverdom is not reliable. In the course of one autumn month in the mountains of Colorado more than one hundred colonies were observed. In many colonies work for the winter commenced early. In others, only a few miles distant, preparations for the winter did not begin until late. In some, extensive preparations were made for the winter. In a few the harvest laid up was exceedingly small. Thus in one month of the same year I saw some beaver colonies preparing for a long winter and others for a short one, many preparing for a hard winter and others almost unprepared for winter. From these varied and conflicting prognostications, how was one accurately to forecast the coming winter? The old prophets in one colony frequently disagreed with aged prophets who were similarly situated, but in a neighboring colony. At one place thirty or more beaver gathered an enormous quantity of food, sufficient, in fact, to have supplied twice that number for the longest and most severe winter. The winter which followed was as mild a one as had passed over the Rocky Mountains in fifty years. Not one tenth of the big food-pile was eaten.

I have not detected anything that indicates that the beaver ever plan for an especially hard winter. Goodly preparations are annually made for winter. Apparently the extent of the preparation in any colony is dependent almost entirely upon the number of beaver that are to winter in that colony. Winter preparations consist of gathering the food-harvest, repairing and sometimes raising the dam, and commonly covering the house with a layer of mud. Beaver display forethought, intelligence, and even wisdom, but being weather-wise is not one of their successful specialties. Local beaver now and then show unusual activity, and unusually large supplies are gathered and stored for the winter. This kind of work appears to be local, not general. The cases in which unusually large preparations were made for the winter could have been traced to an increased population of the colony that showed these activities. On the other hand, colonies with less preparations one year than on the preceding one probably had suffered a decrease of population. Increase of population in a beaver colony may be accounted for through the growing up of youngsters, or by the arrival of immigrants, or both; where the temporary inactivity of trappers in one locality might allow the beaver colony in that region to increase in numbers; or where the beaver population of that colony might be increased by the arrival of beaver driven from their homes by aggressive hunters and trappers in adjoining localities. At any rate, in the beaver world, some colonies each year commence work earlier than do others, and some colonies make extensive preparations for the winter, while others make but little preparation. This preparation appears to be determined chiefly by the number of colonists and the needs of the colony.

The beaver hastened, if it did not bring, the settlement of the country. Hunters and trappers blazed the trails, described the natural resources, and lured the permanent settlers to possess the land and build homes among the ruins left by the beaver. Early in the fur industry companies were formed, the Hudson's Bay Company becoming the most influential and best known. Its charter was granted by Charles II of England on the 2d day of May, 1669. This company finally developed into one of the greatest commercial enterprises that America has ever known. The skin of the beaver furnished more than half its revenue. There are many features in the history of this company that have never been surpassed in any land. For more than two hundred years it held absolute sway over a country larger than Europe, and for the first one hundred and fifty years of its existence it was the government of the territory where it ruled, and thus determined the social and other standards of life within that territory. One of the early officials of this company declared that they were on the ground ahead of the missionaries, and said that the initials "H. B. C." on the banner of the company might well be interpreted as "Here before Christ."

Kingsford's History of Canada says that in the eighteenth century, Canada exported a moderate quantity of timber, wheat, the herb called ginseng, and a few other commodities, but from first to last she lived chiefly on beaver skins. Horace T. Martin, formerly Secretary of Agriculture for Canada, calls the beaver's part in Canadian development "a subject which has from the inception of civilization been associated with the industrial and commercial development, and indirectly with the social life, the romance, and to a considerable extent with the wars of Canada."

The American Fur Company and the Northwestern Fur Company were two large fur-gathering enterprises whose trappers ranged afar and who left their mark in the history and the development of the Northwest. The colossal Astor fortune really had its beginning in the wealth which John Jacob Astor amassed chiefly through the gathering and the sale of beaver skins. Beaver skins are now economically unimportant in commerce, but their value has already led to the establishment of a few beaver farms.

To-day beaver are apparently extinct over the greater portion of the area which they formerly occupied, and are scarce over the remaining inhabited area. Scattered colonies are found in the Rocky Mountains and in the mountains of the Pacific Coast, and there are localities in Canada where they are still fairly abundant. In many places in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado they are common. A few are found in Michigan and Maine. Some years ago a few brooks in the Adirondacks were successfully colonized with these useful animals. They have reappeared in Pennsylvania, and there probably are straggling beaver all over the United States which, if protected, would increase.

There is a growing sentiment in favor of allowing the beaver to multiply. In 1877 Missouri passed a law protecting these animals; so did Maine in 1885 and Colorado in 1899. Other States to the total number of twenty-four have also legislated for their protection. The Canadian government has also passed protective laws. A noticeable increase has already occurred in a few localities. Beaver multiply rapidly under protection, as is shown in the National Parks of both Canada and the United States.

As Others See Him

For three hundred years the beaver has been a popular subject for discussion. Fabulous accounts have been given concerning his works, and that which he has done has been exaggerated beyond recognition. Many of the descriptions of him are grotesque, and many accounts of his works are uncanny. His tail has been made to do the work of a pile-driver, and some of the old accounts credit him with driving stakes into the ground that were as large as a man's thigh and five or six feet long. Stories have been told that his tail was used as a trowel in plastering the house and the dam. A few writers have stated that he lived in a three-story lodge. More than a century ago Audubon called attention to the enormous mass of fabrications that had been written concerning this animal, and in 1771 Samuel Hearne of the Hudson's Bay Company denounced a beaver nature-faker in the following terms: "The compiler of the Wonders of Nature and Art seems to have not only collected all the fictions into which other writers on the subject have run, but has so greatly improved on them that little remains to be added to his account of the beaver beside a vocabulary of their language, a code of their laws, and a sketch of their religion, to make it the most complete natural history of that animal."

One might read almost the entire mass of printed matter concerning the beaver without obtaining correct information about his manners and customs or an accurate description of his works and without getting at the real character of this animal. The actual life and character of the beaver, however, the work which he does, the unusual things which he has accomplished, are really more interesting and place the beaver on a higher plane than do all the fictitious tales and exaggerated accounts written concerning him.

Mr. Lewis H. Morgan in his "American Beaver and his Works" says: "No other animal has attracted a larger share of attention or acquired by his intelligence a more respectable position in the public estimation. Around him are the dam, the lodge, the burrow, the tree-cutting, and the artificial canal, each testifying to his handiwork, and affording us an opportunity to see the application as well as the results of his mental and physical powers. There is no animal below man in the entire range of Mammalia which offers to our investigation such a series of works, or presents such remarkable material for study and illustration of animal psychology."

Mr. Morgan was for years a capable and painstaking student of the beaver. That which he has written is so important a contribution concerning the beaver that no one interested in this animal can afford to be unacquainted with it. In the preface of his book he says: "I took up the subject as I did fishing, for summer recreation. In the year 1861, I had occasion to visit the Red River Settlement in the Hudson's Bay Territory, and in 1862, to ascend the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains, which enabled me to compare the works of the beaver in these localities with those on Lake Superior. At the outset I had no expectation of following up the subject year after year, but was led on, by the interest which it awakened, until the materials collected seemed to be worth arranging for publication."

The greatest admirers of the beaver are those who know him best. He bears acquaintance. This cannot be had by merely looking at the animal, nor by sympathetically studying his monumental works. These works will of course impress one, but they give one at best only a traveler's impression. Long and repeated visits to the colony in its busy season appear to be the best way to get at the character of the beaver. The cubical contents of a dam may not even suggest the obstacles overcome in its construction, the labor of getting the material, the dangers avoided, the numerous unexpected difficulties overcome. Five cords of green poles and limbs in a neat pile in the pond by the beaver house may tell that the harvest has been gathered, but it does not tell that a part of this harvest may have been gathered a mile away and skillfully transported to the house with difficulty and amid dangers. A part of the food-pile may have been dragged laboriously uphill and along trails which required months of labor to open; or numerous pieces in this pile may have been floated through a canal of such magnitude that a generation was required to construct it. Altogether, harvest-gathering is interesting and heroic work on the part of the beaver. In doing it he takes large risks, for the harvest is usually gathered far from the house and on the dangerous beaver frontier.

For more than a quarter of a century I have been a friendly visitor to his colonies, in which I have lingered long and lovingly. That he makes mistakes is certain, but that he is an intelligent, reasoning animal I have long firmly believed. As I said in "Wild Life on the Rockies,"--"I have so often seen him change his plans so wisely and meet emergencies so promptly and well that I can think of him only as a reasoner."

As evidence that he sometimes reasons, it may be cited that he occasionally endeavors to fell trees in a given direction; that he often avoids cutting those entangled at the top; that sometimes he will, on a windy day, fell trees on the leeward side of a grove; that he commonly avoids felling trees in the heart of a grove, but cuts on the outskirts of it. He occasionally dams a stream, digs a canal, leads water to a dry place, and there forms and fills a reservoir and establishes a home. Often his house is built by a spring and thus the danger from thick ice avoided. These are some of the reasons for my believing him to be intelligent.

Morgan speaks of the beaver as "endowed with a mental principle which performs for him the same office that the human mind does for man," and says, "The works of the beaver afford many interesting illustrations of his intelligence and reasoning capacity," also, "In the capacity thereby displayed of adapting their works to the ever-varying circumstances in which they find themselves placed instead of following blindly an invariable type, some evidence of possession on their part of _free intelligence_ is undoubtedly furnished."

Mr. George J. Romanes has the following opinion of the beaver: "Most remarkable among rodents for instinct and intelligence, unquestionably stands the beaver. Indeed there is no animal--not even excepting the ants and bees--where instinct has risen to a higher level of far-reaching adaptation to certain constant conditions of environment, or where faculties, undoubtedly instinctive, are more puzzlingly wrought up with faculties no less undoubtedly intelligent.... It is truly an astonishing fact that animals should engage in such vast architectural labors with what appears to be the deliberate purpose of securing, by such artificial means, the special benefits that arise from their high engineering skill. So astonishing, indeed, does this fact appear, that as sober minded interpreters of fact we would fain look for some explanation which would not necessitate the inference that these actions are due to any intelligent appreciation, either of the benefits that arise from labor, or of the hydrostatic principles to which this labor so clearly refers."

Mr. Alexander Majors, originator of the Pony Express, who lived a long, alert life in the wilds, pays the beaver the following peculiar tribute in his "Seventy Years on the Frontier": "The beaver, considered as an engineer, is a remarkable animal. He can run a tunnel as direct as the best engineer could do with his instruments to guide him. I have seen where they have built a dam across a stream, and not having sufficient head water to keep their pond full, they would cross to a stream higher up the side of the mountain, and cut a ditch from the upper stream and connect it with the pond of the lower, and do it as neatly as an engineer with his tools could possibly do it. I have often said that the beaver in the Rocky Mountains had more engineering skill than the entire corps of engineers who were connected with General Grant's army when he besieged Vicksburg on the banks of the Mississippi. The beaver would never have attempted to turn the Mississippi into a canal to change its channel without first making a dam across the channel below the point of starting the canal. The beaver, as I have said, rivals and sometimes even excels the ingenuity of man."

Longfellow translates the spirit of the beaver world into words, and enables one in imagination to restore the primeval scenes wherein the beaver lived:--

"Should you ask me, whence these stories? Whence these legends and traditions, With the odors of the forest, With the dew and damp of meadows,

* * * * *

Should you ask where Nawadaha Found these songs so wild and wayward, Found these legends and traditions, I should answer, I should tell you, 'In the bird's-nests of the forest, In the lodges of the beaver.'"

And the cunning Pau-Puk-Keewis, fleeing from the wrath of Hiawatha, ran,--

"Till he came unto a streamlet In the middle of the forest, To a streamlet still and tranquil, That had overflowed its margin, To a dam made by the beavers, To a pond of quiet water, Where knee-deep the trees were standing, Where the water-lilies floated, Where the rushes waved and whispered. On the dam stood Pau-Puk-Keewis, On the dam of trunks and branches, Through whose chinks the water spouted, O'er whose summit flowed the streamlet. From the bottom rose the beaver, Looked with two great eyes of wonder, Eyes that seemed to ask a question, At the stranger Pau-Puk-Keewis."

The Beaver Dam

Millions of beaver ponds graced America's wild gardens at the time the first settlers came. These ragged and poetic ponds varied in length from a few feet to one mile, and in area they were from one hundred acres down to a miniature pond that half a dozen merry children might encircle. These ponds were formed by dams built by beaver, and the dams varied greatly in size and were made of poles variously combined with sticks, stones, trash, rushes, and earth.

In the Bad Lands of Dakota I saw two dams that were made of chunks of coal. This material had caved from a near-by bluff. I have noticed a few that were constructed of cobble-stones. The water-front of these dams was filled and covered with clay, and they were the work of "grass beavers,"--beaver that subsist chiefly on grass, and that live in localities almost destitute of trees.

It is doubtful if a dam is ever made by felling logs or large trees across the stream. I have, however, seen a few real log dams, but in these the logs were placed parallel to the flow of water. One of these was in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. Here a snow-slide swept several hundred trees down the mountain. This wreckage was piled on the bank of a stream. Beaver in a colony a short distance away accepted this gift of the gods, and of these unwieldy logs built a dam about two hundred feet downstream from where the avalanche had piled the logs. This dam was a massive affair, about forty feet long and eight feet high. It really appeared more like a log jam than a dam, but it served the purpose intended and raised the level of the river so that the water overflowed to one side and spread in a broad sheet against a cliff and through a grove of aspens, which the beaver proceeded to harvest.

The majority of dams are made of slender green poles which are placed lengthwise with the flow for the bottom, and set braced with the end upstream a foot or so higher than the downstream end. With these there are occasionally used small limby trees. The large end of the tree is placed upstream, and the small bushy end downstream. If in a current these sometimes are weighed down with mud or stones. Short, stout sticks and long, slender poles are deftly mingled in the dam as it rises. The poles overlie, and many completed dams appear as though made of gigantic inclined half-closed shears and compasses of poles. Thus a dam is doubly braced. The weight against it is resisted both by the end-on poles that are parallel to the flow and by those set at an angle to it.

The shape and the material of a dam are dependent on a number of things: the nature of the place where built, the kind of materials available for its building, the purpose it is intended to serve, and the relation it may have to dams already constructed. Sometimes a small dam will be made--that may ultimately become a big one--by simply digging a ditch across the stream or basin and piling the excavated material into a dam.

Beaver, like men, are unequal in their skill, both in planning and in doing work, and the work of most beaver falls short of perfection. Errors are not uncommon. More than one colony has commenced a dam apparently without knowing that there was not sufficient available material to complete it. Others have built in the wrong places, and have thus failed to flood the area which they desired to reach or cover with water. Occasionally the difficulties of construction have been too great for the beaver who attempted it, and the dam has been abandoned in an incomplete state. Now and then a weak dam breaks, or a strong one is swept out by a flood.

But why do beaver need or want the pond which the dam forms? They need it for the purpose of maintaining water of sufficient depth and area to enable them to move about in safety, and to transport their food-supplies with the greatest ease. Above all, the pond is a place of refuge into which the beaver can constantly plunge and have security from his numerous and ever watchful enemies. The house-entrance must be kept water-covered. In the water the beaver is in his element. On the land he is a child lost in the wilds. He has extremely short legs and a heavy body. His make-up fits him for movement in the water. He is a graceful swimmer, and in the water can move easily and evade enemies; while on land he is an awkward lubber, moves slowly, and is easily overtaken. Water of sufficient depth and area, then, is essential to the life and happiness of the beaver. To have this at all times it is necessary, in localities where the supply is at times insufficient, to maintain it by means of dams and ponds.

Deep ponds are needed around the house; shallow ponds with shores in near-by groves facilitate far-away logging. Dams are placed across streams whose waters are to be led away through new channels and made to serve elsewhere in canals or ponds. Dams are made across inclined canals to catch and hold water in them. Streams are beaver's avenues of travel. Along shallow streams in a beaver country it is not uncommon to see an occasional short dam which forms a deep hole, which apparently is maintained as a harbor or place of safety into which traveling beaver may dive and be made safe from pursuit.

Most beaver dams are built on the installment plan. They are the result of growth. The new dam is short and comparatively low. It is enlarged as conditions may require. As the trees in the edge of the pond are harvested, the dam is built higher and longer, so as to flood a larger area; or as sediment fills the pond, the dam is from time to time raised and lengthened in order to maintain the desired depth of water. Thus it may grow through the years until the possibilities of the locality are exhausted. The dam may then be abandoned. It may be used for a few years or it may be used for a century. A gigantic beaver dam may thus represent the work of several generations of beaver. It often occurs that one or more generations may use a dam and yearly add something to its size. By and by these beaver may die or emigrate. The old dam remains, falling to ruin in places. Years go by and other beaver come upon the scene. The old dam is then used for the foundation for a new one. The appearance of some old dams indicates that they have been repeatedly used and abandoned.

New dams, being made largely of coarse materials, appear very unlike old ones. Decay, settling, repairs, and other changes come rapidly. The dam is built of poles to-day; it speedily becomes earthy and is planted by nature to grass, willows, and flowers. On old, large dams it is not uncommon to see old forest-trees. The roots of these entangle the constructive materials, penetrate deeply, and help to anchor securely the entire dam.