314 APPENDICES. 



mer very frequently in traps. In winter they are very fat and 

 delicious ; but the trouble of rearing their young, the thinness 

 of their hair, and their constantly roving from place to place, 

 with the trouble they have in providing against the approach of 

 winter, generally keep them very poor during the summer season, 

 at which time their flesh is but indifferent eating, and their skins 

 of so little value that the Indians generally singe them, even to 

 the amount of many thousands in one summer. They have from 

 two to five young at a time. Mr. Dobbs, in his account of Hud- 

 son's Bay, enumerates no less than eight different kinds of beaver ; 

 but it must be understood that they are all of one kind and species ; 

 his distinctions arise wholly from the different seasons of the 

 year in which they are killed, and the diflerent uses to which 

 their skins are applied, which is the sole reason that they vary 

 so much in value. 



:1c ***** * 



Lefranc, as an Indian, must have known better than to have 

 informed Mr. Dobbs that the beaver have from ten to fifteen 

 young at a time; or if he did he must have deceived him willfully, 

 for the Indians, by killing them in all stages of gestation, have 

 abundant opportunities of ascertaining the usual number of their 

 offspring. I have seen some hundreds of them killed at the 

 season favorable for these observations, and never could discover 

 more than six young in one female, and that only in two in- 

 stances, for the usual number, as I have before observed, is from 

 two to five. 



Besides this unerring method of ascertaining the real number 

 of young which any animal has at a time, there is another rule 

 to go by with respect to the beaver, which experience has proved 

 to the Indian never to vary or deceive them, that is by dissection; 

 for on examining the womb of a beaver, even at a time when not 

 with young, there is always found a hardish round for every 

 young she had at the last litter. This is a circnmstance I have 

 been particularly careful to examine, and can afiirm it to be true 

 from real experience. 



Most of the accounts, nay I may say all the accounts now ex- 

 tant respecting the beaver, are taken from the authority of the 

 French, who have resided in Canada; but their accounts difier 

 so much from the real state and economy of all the beaver to the 

 north of that place, as to leave great room to suspect the truth of 



