152 
FOREST AND 
STREAM 
April, 1921 
THE RENAISSANCE OF THE BEAVER 
FROM AN INTERESTING EXPERIMENT IN 1905 THE RESTOCKING OF THESE INDUSTRI- 
OUS ANIMALS HAS BECOME A VEXATIOUS PROBLEM IN THE ADIRONDACKS TODAY 
By ROBERT B. PECK 
T HE beaver has come back to New 
York. His wedge-shaped head 
ploughs glittering furrows in the 
moonlight across hundreds of Adiron- 
dack lakes. The resounding smack of 
his tail upon the water echoes from 
their shaggy shores. His conical dwell- 
ing lifts its peak along the sedgy banks 
of a hundred amber streams. 
The crackle, swish and thud of his 
felled trees sets the jays to squalling. 
The miracle of his casual-looking dams 
amazes thousands of vacationists every 
season and every season provokes pro- 
fane expostulation from hundreds of 
guides whose watery thoroughfares are 
obstructed, from hundreds of anglers 
whose quarry finds sanctuary and 
abundant food among the drowned and 
drowning bushes above a beaver dam 
and from every property owner whose 
timber is cut, whose land is flooded, 
whose prospect is desolated by dead and 
dying trees. 
For the beaver has come back with a 
vengeance. In numbers estimated by 
the State of New York Conservation 
Commission at from fifteen to twenty 
thousand, they are taking cool posses- 
sion of the whole Adirondack forest. 
It is estimated that in the early 17th 
century a million beaver dwelt, almost 
untroubled, in the Adirondack wilder- 
ness. In 1895 they virtually were ex- 
tinct. The late Harry V. Radford, who 
made a study of the animal, estimated 
that at that time not more than five or 
ten individuals survived in the Adiron- 
si o rtlr WrtnTif qiti vo rn nn 
It is doubtful whether any of these 
survived to see the regeneration of their 
tribe, the brightening of the glory 
which doubtless the soothsayers of the 
race prophesied for their kind, one of 
which, according to Indian myth, dived 
into the seething waters which covered 
the earth at the time of the flood and 
brought up in its paw the tiny bit of 
soil from which the world was rebuilt. 
In 1905, ten years after belated legis- 
lation provided protection for any 
beaver which still might hold out in the 
Adirondacks, a few pairs were liberated 
by the state. To-day they are so nu- 
outlet of Eighth Lake, Fulton Chain 
merous and so troublesome in some sec- 
tions that agents of the Conservation 
Commission were dispatched this winter 
to trap them for the state in the re- 
gions where they were causing the 
most damage. 
How the worthy burghers of old Fort 
Orange would blink could they tread 
Capitol Hill to-day and see officials of 
this gigantic New Netherlands scratch- 
ing their polls to discover a way of thin- 
ning out the beaver! 
F OR centuries the beaver, almost as 
fully the master of his environ- 
ment as the lordly porcupine, led a 
carefree existence in the mountainous 
lake region that occuoies the northeast- 
ern section of New York. Before the 
day of Fort Orange the Adirondack 
beaver had small cause to suspect that 
there was an animal which walked on 
two legs and wore the skins of those 
J-TicH nn ■Faitt 
Even after the advent of the whites 
the Adirondacks, for obvious reasons, 
were almost uninhabited for many years 
and the chief enemies of the beaver were 
the furred marauders of the wilderness. 
For the most part his sagacity served 
to outwit them. 
Indian folklore gave an evil reputa- 
tion to the Adirondack region. It was 
regarded as the abode of malevolent 
spirits. Also it was the barrier between 
the Long House of the Iroquois and the 
Hurons of Canada. Either reason might 
have sufficed to cause the savages to 
shun it. With both superstition and 
caution as motives, the red men on both 
sides of the mountains were inclined to 
give them a wide berth and they were 
penetrated only by war parties who first 
propitiated the malign influences and 
then laid a direct course through the 
sombre land to their destination. 
But with the whites came an almost 
insatiable demand for the fur of the 
beaver. The nearer beaver communities 
suffered first. From greater and great- 
er distances came the bales of skins that 
the sloops carried down the Hudson 
River from Albany. Fort Pitt and Fort 
Oswego were planted on the westward 
trail of the beaver. It doubtless was 
while French and English were strug- 
gling for the lucrative fur trade that 
greed triumphed over superstition and 
caution and the harrying of the Adiron- 
dack beaver began. 
Despite greed of humans, however, 
the Adirondack beaver held doggedly to 
their fatherland, the ancient plateau 
which stood when a great sea rolled 
across interior America. With fifteen 
hundred lakes and ponds and a maze of 
rivers, creeks and brooks to dwell in, 
they survived the trapper, red and 
white, for generations. Throughout the 
period of the French and Indian wars 
the very greed of the whites may have 
served to protect the Adirondack beaver 
from annihilation as the territory was 
debatable ground and trappers of either 
party risked their scalps if they ven- 
tured too far. 
It is probable, however, that by 1905 
the beaver was extinct in the state 
where once its fur was a staple of com- 
merce and a medium of exchange, and 
whose chief city gave the animal itself 
a place of honor on its seal and coat of 
arms. Here and there a guide could be 
found who would not admit that the 
beaver had been killed off. Such a one 
would speak significantly of a swift- 
swimming animal that darted beneath 
his boat in some remote stream or of a 
slapping detonation on a tranquil pond. 
A woodsman told the writer in 1903 
that he had seen an animal the preced- 
ing year swimming beneath the surface 
in the south branch of the Moose River 
which he thought was a beaver. The 
Courtesy New York Conservation Commission 
Havoc Wrought by beaver near the 
