MODE OF TRAPPING BEAVER. Z43 



"It is interesting, however, that so remarkable a 

 custom should furnish immediately such a mass of 

 materials for scientific investigation. Think of sixty 

 skulls off-hand ? They are promised to me without 

 fail. Do not, however, count them already sure, 

 because these sons of the forest, as a general thing, 

 fail to apprehend the relation between a promise and 

 its fulfillment, which the more civilized man finds it 

 convenient to observe."^ 



The number of beavers taken during a season's 

 hunt varies, of course, with the skill of the trapper 

 and the supply within his district. On the south 

 shore of Lake Superior, an Indian family of four 

 effective persons will capture from seventy-five to one 

 hundred and fifty, if their hunting grounds are well 

 stocked. Fifty and a hundred are not an uncommon 

 number.^ But the business must be assiduously fol- 

 lowed to secure any degree of success. 



The statistics of the fur trade sufficiently prove that 

 beavers existed in immense numbers in different parts 

 of North America at the several epochs of their set- 

 tlement. A brief reference to some of the figures 

 will make this apparent. In 1624, the Dutch West 



^ It is proper to add that the promise was amply redeemed by 

 the production, in due time, of forty skulls. 



* John Hutchins, a famous trapper, now residing in Manlius, 

 New York, estimates the number of animals he has caught in 

 traps, or taken in other ways in the course of his life, as follows : 

 "one hundred moose; one thousand deer ; ten caribou ; one hun- 

 dred bears ; fifty wolves ; five hundred foxes ; one hundred rac- 

 coons ; twenty-five wild-cats ; one hundred lynx ; one hundred 

 and fifty otters; six hundred beavers ; four hundred fishers; mink 

 and marten by the thousands, musk-rats by the ten thousands." — 

 Newhouse^s Trapper's Guide, p. 64. 



