OBSERVATIONS ON THE BEAVER. 101 



of our state, and prol^ably in any part, was in the Spring 

 of 1809, when a party of them came up lake Memphre- 

 magog and encamped on Indian Point ; leaving their fam- 

 ilies, the men went directly to the eastern part of Brown- 

 ington, where was a pretty largo community' of heavers 

 on a branch ot Willonghby's River, and in two days they 

 killed and scattered the whole. A Mr. Jeremiah Morrill 

 of Irasburg, the principal hunter of the county, had found 

 them in the winter before, and thinking he could take 

 them better in open water than under the ice left till 

 spring. To his sorrow he found that delays were danger- 

 ous and that the Indians were just two days ahead of him. 

 In this raid of the Indians Orleans and Essex counties 

 were fully searched and here and there a solitary beaver 

 was left. 



AVhen the Indians wish to sweep the whole they gener- 

 al ]}' cut a sluice in the dam, and lie in wait for the own- 

 er when he comes to mend it. Tradition has handed 

 down a story of a white man who being on good terms 

 with the Indians, Avent with them to take some beavers on 

 a branch of Moose River in the town of Victorv. The es- 

 tablishment was large, and after making an opening in 

 the dam they placed themselves tomahawk in hand, and 

 waited for the game. In the course of the night they 

 killed fifty two. 



The few left by the Indians, scattered about Northern 

 Vermont, and pursued by a new race of hunters, were, in 

 a few years, all destroyed. The last one, I think, was 

 taken on Cl^'de River in Derby by ]Mr. Charles Sias about 

 1830. Thus, wherever civilization extends itself, this in- 

 teresting animal becomes extinct. 



It is pleasant to converse with Nature in the deep wil- 

 derness, where everything, animate and inaninialc liears 

 the impress of the hand that made it, unuiarred by the 

 hand of man. It is a place where the pure air, much 

 more inviiroratino- than that we breath(- in our close 

 houses, will restore declining health better than all the 



