For three hundred years the beaver has been a popular subject for
discussion. Fabulous accounts have been given concerning his works,
and that which he has done has been exaggerated beyond recognition.
Many of the descriptions of him are grotesque, and many accounts of
his works are uncanny. His tail has been made to do the work of a
pile-driver, and some of the old accounts credit him with driving
stakes into the ground that were as large as a man's thigh and five or
six feet long. Stories have been told that his tail was used as a
trowel in plastering the house and the dam. A few writers have stated
that he lived in a three-story lodge. More than a century ago Audubon
called attention to the enormous mass of fabrications that had been
written concerning this animal, and in 1771 Samuel Hearne of the
Hudson's Bay Company denounced a beaver nature-faker in the following
terms: "The compiler of the Wonders of Nature and Art seems to have
not only collected all the fictions into which other writers on the
subject have run, but has so greatly improved on them that little
remains to be added to his account of the beaver beside a vocabulary
of their language, a code of their laws, and a sketch of their
religion, to make it the most complete natural history of that
animal."
One might read almost the entire mass of printed matter concerning the
beaver without obtaining correct information about his manners and
customs or an accurate description of his works and without getting at
the real character of this animal. The actual life and character of
the beaver, however, the work which he does, the unusual things which
he has accomplished, are really more interesting and place the beaver
on a higher plane than do all the fictitious tales and exaggerated
accounts written concerning him.
Mr. Lewis H. Morgan in his "American Beaver and his Works" says: "No
other animal has attracted a larger share of attention or acquired by
his intelligence a more respectable position in the public estimation.
Around him are the dam, the lodge, the burrow, the tree-cutting, and
the artificial canal, each testifying to his handiwork, and affording
us an opportunity to see the application as well as the results of his
mental and physical powers. There is no animal below man in the entire
range of Mammalia which offers to our investigation such a series of
works, or presents such remarkable material for study and illustration
of animal psychology."
Mr. Morgan was for years a capable and painstaking student of the
beaver. That which he has written is so important a contribution
concerning the beaver that no one interested in this animal can afford
to be unacquainted with it. In the preface of his book he says: "I
took up the subject as I did fishing, for summer recreation. In the
year 1861, I had occasion to visit the Red River Settlement in the
Hudson's Bay Territory, and in 1862, to ascend the Missouri River to
the Rocky Mountains, which enabled me to compare the works of the
beaver in these localities with those on Lake Superior. At the outset
I had no expectation of following up the subject year after year, but
was led on, by the interest which it awakened, until the materials
collected seemed to be worth arranging for publication."
The greatest admirers of the beaver are those who know him best. He
bears acquaintance. This cannot be had by merely looking at the
animal, nor by sympathetically studying his monumental works. These
works will of course impress one, but they give one at best only a
traveler's impression. Long and repeated visits to the colony in its
busy season appear to be the best way to get at the character of the
beaver. The cubical contents of a dam may not even suggest the
obstacles overcome in its construction, the labor of getting the
material, the dangers avoided, the numerous unexpected difficulties
overcome. Five cords of green poles and limbs in a neat pile in the
pond by the beaver house may tell that the harvest has been gathered,
but it does not tell that a part of this harvest may have been
gathered a mile away and skillfully transported to the house with
difficulty and amid dangers. A part of the food-pile may have been
dragged laboriously uphill and along trails which required months of
labor to open; or numerous pieces in this pile may have been floated
through a canal of such magnitude that a generation was required to
construct it. Altogether, harvest-gathering is interesting and heroic
work on the part of the beaver. In doing it he takes large risks, for
the harvest is usually gathered far from the house and on the
dangerous beaver frontier.
For more than a quarter of a century I have been a friendly visitor to
his colonies, in which I have lingered long and lovingly. That he
makes mistakes is certain, but that he is an intelligent, reasoning
animal I have long firmly believed. As I said in "Wild Life on the
Rockies,"--"I have so often seen him change his plans so wisely and
meet emergencies so promptly and well that I can think of him only as
a reasoner."
As evidence that he sometimes reasons, it may be cited that he
occasionally endeavors to fell trees in a given direction; that he
often avoids cutting those entangled at the top; that sometimes he
will, on a windy day, fell trees on the leeward side of a grove; that
he commonly avoids felling trees in the heart of a grove, but cuts on
the outskirts of it. He occasionally dams a stream, digs a canal,
leads water to a dry place, and there forms and fills a reservoir and
establishes a home. Often his house is built by a spring and thus the
danger from thick ice avoided. These are some of the reasons for my
believing him to be intelligent.
Morgan speaks of the beaver as "endowed with a mental principle which
performs for him the same office that the human mind does for man,"
and says, "The works of the beaver afford many interesting
illustrations of his intelligence and reasoning capacity," also, "In
the capacity thereby displayed of adapting their works to the
ever-varying circumstances in which they find themselves placed
instead of following blindly an invariable type, some evidence of
possession on their part of _free intelligence_ is undoubtedly
furnished."
Mr. George J. Romanes has the following opinion of the beaver: "Most
remarkable among rodents for instinct and intelligence, unquestionably
stands the beaver. Indeed there is no animal--not even excepting the
ants and bees--where instinct has risen to a higher level of
far-reaching adaptation to certain constant conditions of
environment, or where faculties, undoubtedly instinctive, are more
puzzlingly wrought up with faculties no less undoubtedly
intelligent.... It is truly an astonishing fact that animals should
engage in such vast architectural labors with what appears to be the
deliberate purpose of securing, by such artificial means, the special
benefits that arise from their high engineering skill. So astonishing,
indeed, does this fact appear, that as sober minded interpreters of
fact we would fain look for some explanation which would not
necessitate the inference that these actions are due to any
intelligent appreciation, either of the benefits that arise from
labor, or of the hydrostatic principles to which this labor so clearly
refers."
Mr. Alexander Majors, originator of the Pony Express, who lived a
long, alert life in the wilds, pays the beaver the following peculiar
tribute in his "Seventy Years on the Frontier": "The beaver,
considered as an engineer, is a remarkable animal. He can run a tunnel
as direct as the best engineer could do with his instruments to guide
him. I have seen where they have built a dam across a stream, and not
having sufficient head water to keep their pond full, they would cross
to a stream higher up the side of the mountain, and cut a ditch from
the upper stream and connect it with the pond of the lower, and do it
as neatly as an engineer with his tools could possibly do it. I have
often said that the beaver in the Rocky Mountains had more engineering
skill than the entire corps of engineers who were connected with
General Grant's army when he besieged Vicksburg on the banks of the
Mississippi. The beaver would never have attempted to turn the
Mississippi into a canal to change its channel without first making a
dam across the channel below the point of starting the canal. The
beaver, as I have said, rivals and sometimes even excels the ingenuity
of man."
Longfellow translates the spirit of the beaver world into words, and
enables one in imagination to restore the primeval scenes wherein the
beaver lived:--
"Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest,
With the dew and damp of meadows,
* * * * *
Should you ask where Nawadaha
Found these songs so wild and wayward,
Found these legends and traditions,
I should answer, I should tell you,
'In the bird's-nests of the forest,
In the lodges of the beaver.'"
And the cunning Pau-Puk-Keewis, fleeing from the wrath of Hiawatha,
ran,--
"Till he came unto a streamlet
In the middle of the forest,
To a streamlet still and tranquil,
That had overflowed its margin,
To a dam made by the beavers,
To a pond of quiet water,
Where knee-deep the trees were standing,
Where the water-lilies floated,
Where the rushes waved and whispered.
On the dam stood Pau-Puk-Keewis,
On the dam of trunks and branches,
Through whose chinks the water spouted,
O'er whose summit flowed the streamlet.
From the bottom rose the beaver,
Looked with two great eyes of wonder,
Eyes that seemed to ask a question,
At the stranger Pau-Puk-Keewis."