NORTH AMERICA AND THE WEST INDIES 53 



In the adjacent part of New Hampshire there were beavers in 

 the Connecticut lakes at least down to 1884, according to Ned 

 Norton (Forest and Stream, vol. 24, p. 457, 1885). Beavers in 

 small numbers continued in the remoter parts of Maine till the 

 middle decades of the last century. At about that time the 

 fashion for beaver hats abated in favor of silk hats, and the 

 demand for fur was also lessened by the substitution of nutria 

 fur from South America. Thoreau, in 1853, on his memorable 

 journey to the Maine woods, relates that they were getting to 

 be numerous again in the Lake Chesuncook region, but their 

 skins brought so little that it hardly paid then to hunt them. 

 J. G. Rich, an old trapper of those days and a correspondent of 

 Agassiz, wrote ten years later that the fur of beavers com- 

 manded only $2.50 a skin, whereas formerly as much as a 

 dollar an ounce was paid. In 1866, legal protection was first 

 given the beaver in Maine. Its numbers slowly increased 

 until during the first decade of the present century it seems to 

 have become locally common in the remoter townships, where 

 it was not allowed to be killed at any time. Increasing com- 

 plaints of timber owners that beavers were damaging their 

 trees by cutting and flooding resulted in 1910 in the establish- 

 ment of a short open season for two years in Somerset and 

 Franklin Counties. In 1911 the area on which beavers could 

 be trapped was extended to other counties. At the present 

 time there seems to be no reason why a fair number of beavers 

 can not be maintained in the wilder areas of the State. 



The history of the beaver in New York State has been re- 

 viewed by Radford (1908), particularly its status in the 

 Adirondacks. "As early as 1623 the importance of the beaver 

 to the Dutch colony was so well recognized as to lead to its 

 incorporation in the seal of New Netherlands." In those times 

 Indians from the St. Lawrence Valley trapped beavers in 

 northern New York and traded them to the French companies 

 at Quebec. Merriam adduces evidence to show that in the 

 1830's beavers in the Adirondacks were at a very low ebb, and 

 DeKay, who traversed the height of land between the sources 

 of the Hudson and the St. Lawrence Rivers in 1840, believed 

 them nearly extirpated, though reported in 1841 "on Indian 

 and Cedar Rivers, and at Paskungameh or Tupper's lake" 

 and in scattered families in parts of Hamilton, St. Lawrence, 

 and Essex Counties. Radford believes that by 1860 there 



