At a recent barbecue during a
breezy Sunday afternoon on the South Fork of the Shoshone River,
near Cody, Wyo., I saw the largest beaver I’ve ever seen. It
was floating in the river’s current like a big dog.
The beaver looked to be about three feet long from nose to flat
tail, and must have weighed 40 pounds. It had a huge, whiskered
head that reminded me of a Scottish terrier. Our host, one of those
modem cowboys who makes a living thanks to a computer and
high-speed Internet service, called us over to look, and we stood
around with our beers and watched with amazement. My friend, whose
place sports some big cottonwoods bordering a stretch of the river,
took lots of pictures but also studied the beaver with some alarm.
As the animal slowly swam upriver, it seemed to scan the
jumble of trembling young willows and cottonwood that covered the
opposite bank. Our host suddenly mentioned that he’d had a
crab apple tree ransacked by a grizzly last year, the bear even
tearing off some limbs.
A beaver isn’t a grizzly,
of course, but you get the idea: It can do a lot of rearranging of
the scenery. All this got me thinking about the role this durable
aquatic rat — Castor canadensis —
played in the history of the American West. After all, the beavers
started it, our relentless moving into the country’s
interior. We wouldn’t be here without them.
Beaver
was the fabric of choice for hats, and in pursuit of pelts in the
17th century, the French methodically worked their way west from
eastern Canada, thus exploring half a continent. By the 1790s,
British traders were probing the Pacific Northwest coast by sea in
search of furs.
Though Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and
Clark on their legendary journey of discovery in 1804 for a myriad
of reasons, a major object was to counter British influence and
open the region to American trappers. One of them, John Colter,
discovered what is now Yellowstone National Park in 1807. Three
years later, John Jacob Astor sent the ship
Tonquin and its crew to establish Astoria, the
first city in Oregon, and a place originally devoted to the fur
trade. From the mountain men who brought in beaver and other furs
to the settlers who followed in wagon trains, the West’s
population boom was under way.
Today, the beaver is seen
as a nuisance across much of the subdivided West. This totemic
animal and its engineering machinations are responsible for flooded
subdivisions and chewed-down ornamental trees.
It’s
a typical story in the New West: People love wildlife until it eats
the pets, shreds the shrubbery or floods the basement. As for the
beaver, it’s spawned a new breed of trapper: Politically
correct newcomers want problem wildlife trapped alive and unharmed,
then relocated to more natural — and convenient —
surroundings.
Just type “Live Trapping Services” into
Google or some other search engine, and listings will pour in from
across America. What would Jim Bridger and Kit Carson make of these
modern-day mountain men who make a living returning beavers to the
wild?
Occasional nuisance or not, we have to give
Castor canadensis credit for possessing a
quality that the writer Wallace Stegner said was lacking in many of
us. Stegner said if the West were to become a society that matched
its scenery, it needed “stickers” willing to commit to a place, to
weather its busts as well as booms, and to work to create durable
Western institutions.
That’s what beaver did,
building dams that tamed floods. For thanks, we’ve subjected
the beaver to trapping and destroyed the animals’ lodges with
dynamite. Yet, given a chance, the beaver or its progeny gets right
back to work. The same might be said for my friend and his
entrepreneurial adventures in cyberspace. I assume his virtual
occupation will keep him in the West, but then, you never know what
people will do, and you certainly never know about the economy.
A bunch of us stood watching that big beaver swim
upstream. It looked as if its periscope nose made the wide wake in
the water all by itself. I wondered if the beaver would return some
night to have a go at my friend’s luscious cottonwood trees.
My friend was already talking about putting heavy chicken wire or
some other barrier around them. I was thinking that the drama might
play out as a struggle between two determined Westerners.
And those young willows across the river trembled in the breeze.
Bill Croke is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He writes in Cody,
Wyoming.
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