Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/26

18 for more than twelve hundred yards ere it becomes indistinct; and doubtless it was originally much longer, as its eastern end has been encroached upon by streets and dwellings. What its height may originally have been can be only a matter of conjecture, as time and the elements have combined to reduce it nearly to a level with the surrounding soil; and its top has given birth and nourishment to mighty trees, long since yielded up to the rapacity of the lumberman, many of whose stumps, half decayed, yet exhibit more than four hundred rings of annular growth. This, too, is but one of a series of five dams upon the same stream grouped in a space of little more than two miles. The Indians have no knowledge or tradition regarding it, though they frequently discovered "stone-wood" (fossil-wood) bearing the marks of beaver-teeth, at the points where the streams forced the barrier.

Of more recent beaver-dams, the writer has examined a few that may be held remarkable. Besides the one near Washington Mine, before mentioned, one on the Ely Branch of the Ish-ko-naw-ba (on the maps misspelled Escanaba), in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, giving origin to a pond, with an area of nearly one hundred acres, known as "Grass Lake"; its length is two hundred and sixty feet. A third in the same peninsula, four hundred and eighty feet long, is on Carp River. But the largest is to be found on Sable River, in New Brunswick, and floods upward of one thousand acres of land at an average depth of two feet. Mr. Thompson, whose writings are deemed most authentic, speaking of a dam visited by him in New Brunswick, in 1794, says:

"My guide informed me we should have to pass over a long beaver-dam. I naturally expected to lead our horses carefully over, but on coming to it found a strip of apparently old and solid ground, covered with short grass, and wide enough for two horses to easily walk abreast. The lower side showed a descent of seven feet, and steep, with a rill of water beneath. The side of the dam next the pond was a gentle slope, and the pond itself a sheet of water a mile and a half square, surrounded by low, grassy banks. The trees about were mostly poplars and aspens, with numerous stumps, whose trunks had been cut down and carried away by the beavers." In two places in this pond were observed clusters of houses "like miniature villages."

One is usually disappointed with the first view of a beaver's house. Instead of the symmetrical, round, plastered dome we are led to expect from most popular accounts, there is seen instead an irregular pile of sticks, mingled with rushes, grass, and stones, broad at the base as compared with the height, and of the same general order of architecture as the dam. Apparently devoid of system, it resembles nothing so much as a gigantic crow's nest turned upside down by the border of a pond or stream. And yet, though they are not plastered smoothly, and the interior exhibits but rough walls merely evened by cutting