144 ROMANCE OF THE BEAVER 
luxuriant, smooth and beautiful, a visible result of 
the beavers’ industry and the super-human direction 
of the power which controls all material things, and 
produces the greatest results from the smallest and 
most insignificant beginnings. How many acres of 
the finest meadow land and richest valleys are the 
result of beavers’ work no one dare say. But 
throughout North America it is fairly safe to say 
that many hundreds of thousands, or even millions 
of acres, of the finest cultivated land owe their 
existence to the beaver. Of course in most places 
all trace of the origin of these bottom lands is lost, 
but every once in a while a beaver-cut stump is 
discovered by those who have to dig down a few 
feet below the surface, and in some cases these 
evidences of beaver work have been found fully 
thirty or forty feet down, where for countless ages 
they have been preserved by the peat which has 
formed over them. Agassiz, speaking of the age of 
beaver work, mentions the building of a mill dam 
which necessitated some excavating. “This soil 
was found to be peat bog. A trench was dug into 
the peat twelve feet wide, by twelve hundred feet 
long, and nine feet deep; all the way along this 
trench old stumps of trees were found at various 
depths, some still bearing marks of having been 
gnawed by beaver teeth.” By calculating the 
growth of the bog as about a foot a century there is 
fairly good evidence that the dam built by the beaver 
must have existed about one thousand years ago. 
