BEAVER ALONG THE REPUBLICAN

By Roy M. Moore

The low marshy banks of the Republican River with its adjoining swamps and sloughs and the thick growth of willows, cottonwoods and cordgrass made an ideal habitat for the beaver.  Down through the ages the Indian probably took the beavers he needed for food and clothing but due to the fact that his methods of trapping were not too efficient and that other animals were easier taken he did not decrease the beaver population to a very great extent.

After 1800 the demand for beaver fur became greater each year.  Hats and capes made from beaver fur were popular in Europe and the style was spreading to America.  The supply of beaver was becoming scarce in the coastal areas and the trappers and fur traders were moving inland.  They followed the tributaries of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers into the middle west and up the Snake, Colorado and Arkansas  rivers into the trapping areas of the Rocky Mountains.  As early as 1830 ahead of the buffalo hunters and ahead of the homesteaders came the beaver trappers and fur traders.  They were friendly with the Indians, even living in his camps at times.  They did not slaughter his buffalo or plow up his grass; they came as friends to trade and trap.  For his furs they gave the Indian tobacco, whiskey, weapons, trinkets and traps.

Until this time the Indians caught the beavers in many different ways.  Their main system of trapping was by the use of snares and deadfalls.  They killed the beavers with clubs and arrows whenever they could catch them on land or in shallow water.  A favorite method used in the winter was to find a place where the beaver was coming through a hole in the ice in search of food, and placing a green willow or cottonwood branch near the hole.  When the beaver had taken this bait, place another a little farther away, thus continuing, until the beaver was going several feet to get the bait.  Then, the Indian would shoot or club him before he could escape to safety under the ice.  This plan required a great degree of patience, the kill was made on a moonlight night when the Indian could wait down-wind from the beaver.  Beavers have a keen sense of smell and hearing and one false move would disrupt the entire plan.  I know this plan will work, several years ago after a number of unsuccessful attempts I shot a beaver nearly fifty feet from the hole where he came through the ice.  This beaver weighed seventy-two pounds.  Records show that some beavers caught along the Republican River have weighed as much as ninety pounds but the average is probably less than half that amount.

The Indians found that the doublespring Newhouse steel traps supplied by the trappers made the taking of beavers a much easier task and by the time the homesteaders began steeling along the Republican, the beavers were becoming scarce and harder to catch.  The early settlers found the flesh of young beaver to be palatable and nourishing food especially if taken in the fall of the year.  Old beavers and those taken in the spring smelled and tasted like the bark of the willow and cottonwood.  The beaver is a strict vegetarian and his diet during the summer and early fall consists more of the roots of plants found growing along the stream banks.

By 1900 the beaver population had been so reduced that it looked as if the beaver would soon be a thing of the past.  Soil from the plowed fields was filling the sloughs and smaller streams, causing them to dry up except during the periods of excessive rainfall.

Was the beaver to follow the trail of the buffalo and passenger pigeon?  You could follow the banks of the Republican for miles and never find a fresh beaver sign.  But in nick of time conditions changed in his favor.  Both the state and federal government passed laws for his protection.  The styles had changed and the demand for his fur had lessened.  Top soil from the fields was washing into the river causing many islands to form and were soon covered with a thick growth of willows and cottonwoods.  In the summer of 1907 my father told of seeing a mother beaver and five kits swimming in the river near our home.  Next year there were more and with the abundance of food, the trapper out of the way, they were living unmolested and in the next ten years there were probably more beavers than there had been in nearly a century.  Farmers complained that beavers were damaging their cornfields and ruining the stands of timber along the streams.  Following World War I the demand for fur was great and the price paid for beaver pelts was the highest it had ever been.  Canada and a few of our northern states had a legal trapping season.  Illegal trapping had started along the Republican.  Fur dealers in Kansas City and St. Louis were smuggling illegally caught beaver pelts into states with open seasons.  A local bootlegger was delivering beaver pelts in Canada and returning with a load of Canadian whiskey.  A pelt that was bought locally for ten or twelve dollars would bring over forty dollars on a legal market.  More states declared an open season on beavers and the price of furs began to weaken;  this and more rigid enforcement in Kansas slowed the trapping along the Republican.  Again the beaver was on the increase and the farmers were complaining to the Gamer Department that the beavers were destroying their property and eating their corn.  Then came 1926, a year of drouth

Today Kansas is following the pattern of most of the other states by declaring an open season when the beaver population is high and closing the season if too many are being caught.  Eight years out of the last ten beaver trapping has been legal.  Last season a local fur dealer bought more than six hundred beaver pelts at an average price of about eight dollars each.  The beaver population is still high, not only in the river but in lakes and streams several miles from the Republican.  Sometimes I wonder that if when the last bomb has been dropped, our cities flattened and humanity nearly exterminated, some lone survivor may struggle up the bank of the Republican River and if he could understand their language he might hear two little beavers say, "We were here first."