170 EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



three hunters working in the Caribou Mountains, southwest 

 of Great Slave Lake, trapped in one season nearly 500 martens, 

 an unusually large catch. The lower Liard River region and the 

 Horn Mountains also are good trapping grounds. Upward 

 of 3,000 skins are said to be usually traded at Fort Norman. 

 Fort Good Hope also receives a large number, and as many as 

 6,000 have been collected at Fort McPherson during an unusu- 

 ally good season . . . Martens vary greatly in abundance 

 in the same locality in different years, and to some extent this 

 increase and decrease are periodic. The winter of 1903-4 was 

 marked by a great scarcity of martens over much of the upper 

 Mackenzie Valley, though in other sections the catch was 

 about normal." At Fort McPherson, A. J. Stone was told in 

 1900 that martens were then as numerous as they had been 

 50 years before when the post was first established. 



In Keewatin and the Hudson Bay region Preble (1902) 

 found the marten (subspecies abieticdta^l^Tly common" 

 north to the tree limit but most abundant in the heavy spruce 

 forests of the southern part. Many skins come in to the posts 

 at Norway House, Oxford House, and York Factory, and a 

 few at Fort Churchill that come from the lower Churchill 

 River." 



Osgood (1900, p. 44), in describing the large marten (M. a. 

 actuosa) of the Yukon region, Alaska, wrote at the time that 

 it "is still the commonest fur-bearing animal of Alaska, not- 

 withstanding the hundreds of thousands that have already 

 been taken. Trappers are always confident of a harvest of 

 martens whether other animals are abundant or not." To the 

 westward, however, in the Cook Inlet region at the base of the 

 Alaskan Peninsula, Dr. Osgood (1901) found it only moderately 

 common. One trapper had taken but 15 martens in a season 

 of two and a half months in 1899 near the mouth of Turnagain 

 Arm. The martens of this area seem to be the typical sub- 

 species. The latest report (July 16, 1939) of the Biological 

 Survey credits Alaska with having shipped in 1938 no less than 

 9,200 pelts of this animal, surely a large number. 



In the western United States and along the Pacific coast 

 the numbers are much less, though it is still fairly plentiful in 

 British Columbia. Of the insular race, nesophila, of the Queen 

 Charlotte Islands, British Columbia, Dr. Osgood (1901) 

 reports that it evidently is not abundant. The Haida Indians 



