Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 May 1884 — The Beaver. [ARTICLE]

The Beaver.

The quickness with which a colony discovers a wholesale attempt against their peace is astonishing; yet if their numbers are undisturbed, or diminished but gradually, even the presence of civilization will not drive them from their haunts. To-day beaver are returning to streams in Michigan, long ago abandoned by their race, simply because they find themselves unmolest-, ed, the demand for beaver-peltry being slight, and the prices paid out of all proportion to the labor entailed in trapping. It has been said that, if a dam or house be once injured by the hand of man, the colony at once disappears. But that this is fallacious is proved by the following-: Twenty-two miles from Marquette, Mich., on the Carp River, a beaver colony began the erection of a new dam. Though the embankment of a railway ran nearly parallel with the stream, and trains passed backward and forward daily, they seemed in no way disturbed, and worked steadily on until the water had risen a foot or more. The trackmaster, observing that this endangered the line —for the embankment had been utilized as a wing of the dam—ordered the water drawn off. But the following day the beavers had repaired the damage done them, and the water was at its former height. Again and again was the dam cut through, and as often would it be repaired. All in all it was cut and repaired seme fifteen or twenty times ere the beavers were sufficiently discouraged to abandon then- attempts. —Popular Science Monthly.