CHAPTER XI. 
Retrosprect—THre Braver Heerra or 1888 anp 
1889—Norers on THE WRECKED BEAVER Farm 
oF Kitt Derr Mountain—Tue Hazen Cotony 
AND A PaTHETIC STORY OF THE BEAVERS 
Attempt to Horp THeEtr Own. 
T was near about the year 1890, that resident trap- 
pers announced that the beavers were ‘‘cleaned 
out along Big Knife River,” the stream of which Char- 
ley Reynolds had spoken of but fifteen years before as 
the most prolific beaver stream in the west—and where 
greater natural advantages existed for the welfare of 
these animals than any other stream that he had noted 
in his wide range of the prairies of the west and north- 
west, that had remained uncultivated and unsettled at 
that date. 
To be sure here and there a wandering beaver left its 
plain marked sign in his efforts to locate a family of his 
own kind that might have escaped the clutches of the 
inhuman humans that had made such desolation along 
these waterways that once teemed with busy animal life. 
But his vision beheld only the broken dams—the blind 
slides and the partly destroyed habitation or the unused 
hole-in-the-bank that had once sheltered the refugees. 
