Part 15 (1/2)
When they make their ponds where the banks are low, they make their house upon the top of the ground, sometimes a rod or more from the edge of the pond, cutting timber of the size of a finger to two or three inches in diameter, placing the sticks in very much the same way as they do in building their dams, crossing and recrossing them so that it is quite a job to tear one of their houses to pieces; in fact no one but a man would undertake the task, and one that has never had any experience would find it very difficult to accomplish. If one does it in the hope of catching the animal, he toils in vain, for he is soon scented, and the beaver takes refuge in the pond, pa.s.sing through the underground tunnel. Where they find high banks, they start a tunnel several feet below the surface of the water and run it ascending, so as to reach a point in the bank six or eight or may be ten feet above the surface of the water underground, stopping before reaching the top of the ground, and at which point they take out dirt until they have a place sufficiently large for their bed. This kind of a house they much prefer to one made with sticks on the surface of the ground, as they are completely hidden from observation or the possibility of interruption from any one.
The beaver's feet are webbed for the purpose of swimming, and there are nails on his feet, so that he can scratch the earth almost equal to a badger. He has a paddle-formed tail, which on a large full-grown beaver is from ten to twelve inches long and from six to seven inches broad, and without any hair on it. These are tough and sinewy, and when cooked they make a very fine food, the flavor reminding one of pig's feet or calf's head. They make considerable use of their tail in performing their work as well as in swimming.
The beaver reproduces itself each year. The offspring are generally two in number, and these can be easily tamed.
The trappers in trapping for the beaver have to use great precaution in approaching the place where they intend to set the traps, often getting into the stream above or below and wading for some distance. If they walked upon the bank the beaver would scent them from the footprints.
Beavers, like all other wild animals, dread the sight or scent of man more than anything else. In setting the traps the trappers invariably choose as deep water as they can find, so that when a beaver is caught he will drown himself in his struggles to get free from the trap; for if this does not occur, he has often been known to cut off, with the sharp chisel used in cutting timber, the foot that is caught in the trap, so that it is not infrequent when the trapper comes in the morning to find a foot of the beaver instead of the beaver himself, and often he catches a beaver with only three feet.
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 a sufficient head of 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 buck 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 ca.n.a.l to change its channel without first making a dam across the channel below the point of starting the ca.n.a.l.
The beaver, as I have said, rivals and sometimes even excels the ingenuity of man.
Another of the peculiarities of the beaver is the great sharpness of its teeth, remaining for many years as sharp as the best edged tool. The mechanic with the finest steel can not make a tool that will not in a short time become so blunt and so dulled as to require renewed sharpening, and this, with the beaver, would have to be repeated hundreds of times in order to do service with it during the whole of its lifetime, which is from ten to fifteen years if it is permitted to live the allotted years of a beaver.
In one of my trips on a steamer of the Upper Missouri, one day while the boat's crew were getting their supply of wood, I took my gun and started along the river-bank in the hope of seeing an elk or deer that I might shoot. I came to a place on the river where the banks were very high, and I observed that a lot of cottonwood saplings from six to eight inches in diameter had been felled and cut into sections. I saw that it had been recently done, and I at first supposed that it had been done by some one with an ax, but when I reached the spot, I saw that it was the work of the beavers and that some of the wood had been dragged away. I followed the trail for a few steps, when I came to the mouth of a tunnel, and discovered that the timber had been dragged through it. The tunnel had an incline of about thirty-five degrees, and was as straight as if it had been made with an auger. This was in the month of October, at the time when it was their custom to stow away their food for the winter. They had no dam at this point, as the water was deep, and they were drawing the timbers down through the tunnel and sinking them in the deep water, so that they could have access to it during the period when the river would be frozen over. The reason for the tunnel, of which I have spoken, was that the river-bank for some distance was high and almost perpendicular, and the beaver, being a very clumsy animal with short legs, his only alternative was to make a tunnel in order to get his winter food. They have a way of sinking the cottonwood and keeping it down in their pond or simply in the deep water when they do not make dams. This family of beavers evidently had their house far under the surface of the ground, for the place was admirably adapted for them to make such a home, the banks being so high above the water. One could see no trace whatever of the beaver, or have a knowledge of where he was, more than the opening of the tunnel and where the timber had been cut; indeed, one might pa.s.s hundreds of times and not be conscious that beavers were living right under one's feet. I picked up one of the chips which the beaver had cut, measuring about seven inches in length, and carried it home with me as a curiosity.
CHAPTER XXVI.
A BOY'S TRIP OVERLAND.
Remembering my own love of adventure as a boy, I can not refrain from giving here a chapter contributed by my son, Green Majors, which will be found both instructive and interesting. He says: ”At the inexperienced age of twelve years I was seized with a strong desire to go overland to Montana. For a number of years I had lived at Nebraska City, on the Missouri River, a starting point in those days for west-bound freight and emigrant wagon trains; and having so long seen the stage-coaches go bounding over the hills and rolling prairies, headed for the golden West, it was with a feeling of great satisfaction that on the morning of April 26, 1866, I was seated on top of one of those same coaches, as a fellow pa.s.senger with my father, Alexander Majors, bound for the Rocky Mountains, and Helena, Mont., in particular. To my boyish fancy the never-ceasing rocking to and fro of the overland coach of early days was a constant delight. Denver we reached in six days and nights of incessant travel. Rain nor s.h.i.+ne, floods nor deserts, stopped us. If a pa.s.senger became too sleepy or exhausted to hold on and sleep at the same time on the outside, he could get inside by submitting to the 'sardining' process. But inside, the clouds of dust and the cramped position necessary to a.s.sume made one at times feel like the coach were spinning round like a top in the dark. At Denver we laid in a big supply of luncheon material, for the next continuous ride, without a town, was for 600 miles, to Salt Lake City. However, before we reached Zion, our troubles were many, one of which was being caught in a violent snow-storm one dark night while bowling along over Laramie Plains. Our driver and his mules both lost the road. He so notified us, and we got out to wade through the innumerable drifts to see if we could feel the hard-beaten trail with our feet. But it was of no use. So for fear we might wander away from the emigrant road too far, or that he might drive over some precipice or into some hole or other in the blinding storm, we unhitched his four mules and tied each one with its head to a wheel, so there could be no runaway, and then all hands got back into the coach, tucked our wraps about us as best we could, and there we sat, like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief, with the wind whistling in all its many sad cadences through the flapping wings of that desolate coach, until the longest night I ever saw went by. Next morning we found two and a half feet of 'the beautiful' on the level, and the struggle to gain another station began. We tramped snow and broke trails for that coach to get through the drifts for about ten or fifteen miles, before we got to a lower alt.i.tude, out of the path of the storm, for all of which distance we of course paid the stage company 25 cents a mile fare, with no baggage allowance to speak of.
”Not a great ways farther on, we struck the famous Bitter Creek country, a section that was the terror of travelers, because of poor gra.s.s, water that was foul and bitter, and alkali plains that were terrific on man and beast. At one place along Bitter Creek its water was as red as blood, at another as yellow as an orange; but generally its color was a dark muddy drab, and highly impregnated with vegetable and earthy matter. I suppose Bitter Creek is the only place on earth where highwaymen had the cold-blooded nerve to charge travelers $1.50 for nothing but fat bacon, poorly cooked, and an inferior quality of mustard, as a meal's victuals, but the stage station-keepers had it there. By the time we finished our Bitter Creek experience we were proof against peril, so that subsequent floods in the canons from melting snows in the mountains, sitting bolt upright with three on a seat to sleep over the rough mountain roads at night, and pa.s.sing over long stretches of country with no water fit to drink, were trivial circ.u.mstances.
”After a thirty-day siege of this sort of experience, we alighted on the gravelly streets of Helena, Mont., then a town of canvas houses and tents, and log huts. Helena at that time was the liveliest town I have ever seen in my life, either in America or Europe, over the whole of both of which I have since traveled. At that time her business houses were largely propped up on stilts, while underneath the red-s.h.i.+rted placer miner was was.h.i.+ng the blue gravel soil for gold-dust. Her streets, in many places, were bridged over, to allow of the same thing.
Sunday was the liveliest day in the week for business. The plainest meal at a restaurant cost $1.50, and bakery pies, with brown paper used for a crust, cost 75 cents each. Everybody had money, and n.o.body appeared to want to keep what he had. Gold-dust was the money of the country, no greenbacks nor coin being used. A pennyweight of the yellow dust pa.s.sed for a dollar, but expert cas.h.i.+ers, at the gaming places and stores, were said to know how to weigh the article so deftly that $100 of it in value would only go $50 in distance. However, wages were very high, and so was everything else, so that if a man were robbed pretty badly, he could soon recuperate his lost fortunes. There were no churches in Helena then, if, indeed, there were any in the Territory. The first Sunday after arriving there, I remember attending divine service in a muslin building, but the blacksmith's hammer next door and the l.u.s.ty auctioneer's voice in the street made so much noise the congregation could not understand the divine's injunctions, so that church-going there, at that time, was attended with considerable annoyance.
Everything was crude and primitive, everybody was cordial, generous, and open-hearted, and anything or anybody justly appealing to those roughly appareled yeomanry for aid or sympathy invariably opened the floodgates of their plenty and fired the great, deep, warm heart-throbs of their n.o.ble natures.
”But they were as prompt in meting out retributive justice to the wrong-doer as in loosing their purse-strings to a worthy applicant, and many were the wayward souls jerked into eternity through the deadly and inexorable noose of the ubiquitous vigilante, whose will was law, and the objects of whose adverse edicts were soon plainly told to recite their last prayers in the body.
”Cattle-raising on the rich, nutritious bunch-gra.s.s of the broad valleys of the Territory also soon grew to be a very lucrative business, to supply the numerous placer-mining towns of Montana, a number of which were quite important and thrifty camps at that time. Farming was also followed to a limited extent. Inasmuch as potatoes, cabbage, and other vegetables were largely imported from Salt Lake, about five hundred miles, all sorts of soil products yielded handsome returns.
”Montana has had her periods of depression as well as of prosperity. For after her then-discovered and easily accessible placer ground became washed out, which took several years, times there grew very dull, but not until something like $200,000,000 worth of gold had been washed from her auriferous gulches and hillsides. Quartz mining was rare in those days, because freight and everything else was so high that few had the means to engage in that kind of mining. From a State of such prosperous activity in the sixties, with a large and well-to-do population, in 1874-75 it grew so dull and so many had left the Territory that those remaining wished they could get away too. In the Centennial year of 1876, however, Montana's true era of prosperity dawned, when rich silver quartz was discovered at the now famous city of b.u.t.te, styled 'the greatest mining camp on earth.' The Territory's business in every avenue soon rose from its low ebb to an affluent flood, all kinds and lines almost immediately feeling its vitalizing, stimulating influence. From an isolated mountain fastness it forthwith again became the theater of activity and thrift, and the stream of precious metals that it again poured into the world's commercial channels not long after required the capacity of a line of railroad to handle its vast volume. Chicago, New York, Boston, and other Eastern centers recognized Montana merchants as among their heaviest and best-paying customers, again demonstrating that mining for the precious metals is the great vanguard of a rapid and substantial civilization. The Utah & Northern was the pioneer railroad into her confines, but its business soon grew to such enormous proportions that the Northern Pacific followed in three or four years, and then Jim Hill swooped in with his Great Northern Road. So that that apparently isolated section has three transcontinentals now running east and west through her entire length, with the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy on her eastern border, impatient to share her immense traffic, and the b.u.t.te, Boise & San Francisco soon to give her a direct outlet to San Francis...o...b..y.
[Ill.u.s.tration: SUNRISE IN CAMP.]
”But to return to the early days of Montana, certainly one of the grandest and richest sections of the Union. It is in this State that the muddy Missouri River has its source, although in the mountainous part of its course its water is as clear as crystal. Here, also, the broad and majestic Columbia has its inception, the heads of these two n.o.ble streams bubbling up out of her lofty mountains quite close together. And it is a striking coincidence that the same section that sends these two n.o.ble streams down through fertile fields to the sea, bearing on their mighty bosoms the wealth and water supply of empires, should also possess the largest and richest deposits of the precious metals that the world has ever known. But such is the case. Speaking of precious metals recalls some of the 'stampedes' to newly discovered mining camps in early days. A 'stampede' is a panic reversed, usually instigated by the wild and rainbow-colored statements of over-enthusiastic persons, and often those statements had utterly no foundation in fact. Men would rise from their beds in the middle of the night, if thought necessary, and with insufficient food, clothing, or implements, afoot or horseback, climb dark mountains or canons, swim floods, tramp over alkali plains, or submit to any and all kinds of hards.h.i.+ps, all for the sake of being among the first on the ground of newly discovered 'diggins.' 'First come, first served,' was the rule, and each man was determined, as nearly as possible, to be first served. In the famous Sun River stampede, in the winter of 1866-67, with the mercury coquetting with the 30-degree-below-zero point, it was said men actually started out in their s.h.i.+rt sleeves to make a hundred-mile journey through the deep snow to the reputed new camp without food supplies to carry them through. And as it often proved in other cases, there wasn't a particle of truth in the reputed rich fields. Dame Rumor, that ever versatile and fertile-brained jade, had had an inning, and she batted hard, firing her hot b.a.l.l.s of deception to all quarters of the field. In those days buffalo were plentiful on the plains of Eastern Montana. I think I have seen from twenty to fifty thousand in a single herd there. They blackened the hills and plains with their s.h.a.ggy coats, they swarmed the rivers in their peregrinations, and raised clouds of dust like a simoon in their journeys across the country. I have seen hundreds of them in a group mired down in the quicksands along the Upper Missouri River.
Hunters walked on their backs and shot the fattest of them as trophies of the chase, and the ever ubiquitous, keen-scented wolves came and gnawed their vitals while they were yet alive, but helpless, in their inextricable positions. At that time bands of stately elk also abounded there. Deer were plentiful, and the fleet-footed antelope bounded over every plain. Mountain sheep, whose tender meat was fat and juicy, climbed the terraced rocky cliffs in great numbers, while ducks, geese, pheasants, fool hens, and many other table fowl were to be had for a little effort on the part of the hunter. A fool hen is a species of bird weighing about two pounds, that is so foolish as to allow the gunner to lay aside his fire-arms and kill the whole flock with sticks and stones, so closely can it be approached without taking flight. Its meat is delicious.
”Many volumes could be written on Montana's early reminiscences, her vast resources, her brilliant past, and her glorious prospective future.
But the brief s.p.a.ce allotted me precludes the possibility of detailed mention of people, places, or things, and I reluctantly stop sharpening my pencil. Montana has been great in the past, but her future will be much grander and greater still.”
CHAPTER XXVII.