39© REPORT OF THE FOREST, FISH AND GAME COMMISSIONER. 



residing in the cleared areas skirting the wilderness, the number of the 

 uninformed was much greater. This universal misconception has been 

 due, probably, largely to the fact that the operations of the few remaining 

 beavers who lingered on in the Adirondacks were, with scant exceptions, 

 restricted, by their own choice, to a single small area northwest of the Upper 

 Saranac Lake, almost wholly included within Township 20, Franklin county. 

 Occasionally, some of them wandered to a considerable distance from the 

 locality named, as was proven by the discovery, in 1898, of fresh signs 

 along the Congamunck Creek,* southeast of Indian Lake, Hamilton county, 

 eighty miles by water from their usual rendezvous ; but such instances were 

 wholly exceptional and not likely to come under the observation of more 

 than a very few persons. 



The public press of the State during the past forty years has repeatedly 

 reflected the general opinion that the beaver was extinct. The same 

 inaccurate statement has been published in county and town histories 

 and similar works of reference presumed to be reliable. Even the natural- 

 ists have gone astray. In 1893, William B. Marshall, the Assistant State 

 Zoologist, in a catalog of " The Mammals of New York, Exhibited at the 

 World's Columbian Exposition," Chicago, reports the beaver " extinct in 

 New York."t The preceeding year Horace T. Martin, F. Z. S., author 

 of Castorologia, a valuable work upon the beaver exclusively, mentioned 

 hereafter, had pronounced the Adirondack beaver extinct. J Two or three 

 years ago a writer in the Essex County Republican, published at Keeseville, 

 in the course of a series of articles purporting to give the natural history 

 of all the animals in Northern New York, described the beaver as ' ' formerly 

 abundant in the Adirondacks, but now extinct." Even the last report § of 

 the New York State Forest, Fish and Game Commission was not free from 

 a misstatement. In the article on " The Squirrels and Other Rodents of 

 the Adirondacks," by the late Frederick C. Paulmier, New York State 

 Zoologist, this appears: " In New York State the rodent population 



* In October of that year Mr. W. T. Campbell, of North Creek, N. Y., found a small beaver house on 

 the inlet of Rock Pond, which enters the Congamunck. 



f Forty-seventh Annual Report, N. Y. State Museum, 1894, p. 44. 



% Castorologia, p. 140. 



§ Eighth and Ninth Reports, bound and issued as one. 



