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:—

And the cunning Pau-Puk-Keewis, fleeing from the wrath of Hiawatha, ran,—