406 REPORT OF THE FOREST, FISH AND GAME COMMISSIONER. 



Square Pond. The information which he then received led him to believe 

 that there had always been beavers in this locality, and that they had been 

 steadily decreasing in number for many years. 



By 1890 we reach conditions with which I am myself personally familiar, 

 having made my first summer visit to these woods in that year.* There 

 were then, according to my estimate, about fifteen wild beavers in the 

 Adirondacks — all in the Township 20 locality. They were building small 

 dams and repairing old ones constantly, but so far as I have been able 

 to learn, they built no huts, or houses. Their fresh cuttings attracted the 

 attention of hundreds of persons, and as they were located within a short 

 distance of the Saranac Inn, many tourists from the cities were enabled to 

 become familiar with their habits, and occasionally some persevering 

 observer had the good fortune to catch a glimpse of one of the interesting 

 aquatics themselves. Almost all of Township 20 was then under the control 

 of the Inn, and the management did all in their power to protect the beavers 

 by fostering local interest and sentiment. There is not much sentiment in 

 the average trapper, however; and natives with steel traps hung around 

 the vicinity of the beavers almost continually, occasionally taking one or 

 more. Only the ignorance and blundering methods of the trappers could 

 have saved the little colony from total destruction; still, it is almost a 

 miracle that they managed to survive at all through the succeeding decade. 

 In 1894 Mr. George Miller, then station agent at the Saranac Inn railway 

 station, and Mr. Wilbur C. Witherstine, a youth of Herkimer, N. Y., shot 

 one or two beavers close by the hotel.. Mr. Witherstine's beaver was found 

 to have one foot missing, showing that the cruel steel traps had been busy. 

 The following fall two trappers from Saranac Lake made a descent upon the 

 locality and took away one or more of the beavers (the exact number was 

 never known). 



This combination of disasters to the little beaver colony of Township 20 

 came nigh snapping, then and there, the feeble life line that had been 

 perpetuating itself, in the face of so many obstacles, for unnumbered genera- 

 tions. In the winter of 1894-5 the number of beavers in the Adirondacks 



* These vacation visits were continued without interruption until the present year (1907), 

 when I took up a permanent residence in the Adirondacks. 



