Oct 30, 2025 Beavers in America: Part 2
In the first part of this series, an ancient relationship between humans and beaver, largely exploitative, was noted., Almost gone from Western Europe by the early Middle Ages, beavers were found to be abundant and available in the New World. There, they were exploited for over three centuries until their numbers finally crashed. Even as this was happening, a keen interest in their natural history generated both fanciful and realistic accounts of their behavior and ecology. Here, we continue to look at these contributions and the recent recovery and repatriation of the beaver.
The Chroniclers, continued
Lewis Henry Morgan
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) is best known as one of the founders of Anthropology, and his contributions to kinship studies inspired the field we now call Ethnology. For a living, he worked as a lawyer, businessperson and later a senator representing upper New York state. Like many gentlemen of his time, he dabbled in scholarly side pursuits, undergirded by an academic background steeped in Scottish Common Sense philosophy.[i] Through his friendship with the affluent Ely family, he served as director of the Marquette and Ontonagon Railroad, which began operations in the mid-1850s in the iron-bearing region of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In travels, there, Morgan experienced what was still mostly an undeveloped wilderness that bore evidence of longstanding occupancy by beaver. Like Samuel Hearne, Morgan befriended local Indigenous people and learned beaver lore from them. Unlike previous chroniclers, he also meticulously documented and measured the infrastructure — dams, lodges and canals — developed by beaver over centuries. He mapped these and the ponds and meadows that remained even after the beaver were gone. The results were compiled and published in The American Beaver and His Works (1868), a work that is belatedly coming to be recognized as a foundational contribution to the study of animal behavior.[ii] At the same time, he was engaged in drafting this study, he was also drafting his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, published in 1871, a work widely recognized as foundational in Anthropology.
Morgan’s exposure to beaver and their works influenced his thinking and contribution to the study of animal intelligence, or “animal psychology” as it was known in his day. The engineering skills of beaver had been praised by the early chroniclers and seen as proof of their “sagacity,”[iii] later upgraded to “mental principle.” Both terms were seemingly used to avoid speaking about nonhumans in ways that might have challenged the contemporary ethos of human exceptionalism. Beginning with a two-part article published in 1843 and then further developed for a talk in 1857, Morgan laid out his thoughts.[iv] Among them was the idea that our treatment of animals (which he thought deplorable) would be improved if humans recognized the mental similarities between them and us. His final synthesis appears as the last chapter in The American Beaver, where he concludes that the differences in the “mental principle” between the “mutes”[v] and humans were of degree, not of kind, a fairly bold proposal for his time. He also argued that “An arrest of the progress of the human race can alone prevent the dismemberment and destruction of a large portion of the animal kingdom (1868: 283),” another prescient view.
Was Morgan a racist? At least one popular book on beaver argues so. In his anthropological works, he famously proposed a hierarchical progression for human society, beginning in a state of savagery that proceeded to barbarism before arriving at civilization. That final achievement, true to Victorian standards, had been achieved most notably by Aryans. This model influenced the development of Anthropology for several generations, not to mention broader social theory. Indeed, Morgan fit into a contemporary “racializing colonial context[vi]” while at the same time advocating strikingly modern thinking about animal sentience. His work continues to be reexamined and re-evaluated. Today, he figures prominently in anthropological discussions on “multispecies ethnographies” (the study of organisms linked to human social worlds[vii]) and in discussions about the valuation of the natural world in, of and for itself.[viii]
Scholars have twice revisited the beaver landscape Morgan documented in such detail in search of any remaining evidence of beaver presence and to document changes occurring over time. Richard Manville visited the area in 1948, almost 8 decades after Morgan, but found that most of the ponds Morgan had mapped no longer existed.[ix] He was followed more than a half-century later by Carol Johnston, who employed modern techniques, including digital orthoimagery, to determine that nearly three-fourths (72%) of the 64 beaver dams and pond sites identified in 1868 were still discernible in 2014.[x] Her conclusion from this, that beaver sites are durable landscape features, underscores a growing area in research on beaver in which they have been cast as acting as geomorphic agents.
Enos Mills
Enos Abijah Mills (1870-1922) was at various times a mountain guide, innkeeper, lobbyist, spokesperson for national parks, as well as a romantic credited with being one of the leading naturalists of his time and author of more than a dozen books focused mainly on the natural history of Colorado.[xi] No animal captured his imagination more than the beaver he encountered near his homestead in Estes Park. In 1913, he published In Beaver World, an account of years of personal study of beaver colonies. Mills was a keen observer of nature, spending much of his time in the wild lands that made up the continental divide and fixing his attention on the animals and their activities, providing detailed descriptions of behavior. Calling beaver the “original conservationist,” Mills praised the influence of their works on both soil and water, noting many of the features we acknowledge today as ecosystem services.
The Mills era saw a flurry of others working on beaver and the beginning of contemporary research, leading to numerous contributions to science journals. One year after In Beaver World came out, A. Radclyffe Dugmore published The Romance of the Beaver, an objective and comprehensive review of the knowledge on the species, augmented by many photographs and drawings by the author. Edward Royal Warren began publishing his studies of beaver in 1904. By 1927, he was assembling these into a book that also served as the second monograph in the American Society of Mammalogists series that continues today.[xii] Warren surveyed and described some of Mill’s sites in 1922, while in 1955, Don Neff revisited the site of the Moraine Colony that Mills may have first located in 1885 when he was 15 years old. The historical record provided by these three individuals established a picture of what Neff called the “insecurity” of beaver populations in the Rockies, subject to wildfires and elimination of their food base, often by their own hands (or paws). The beaver of the Rockies seemed always on the move into and out of areas as the vegetation they depended on for food declined and recovered. Whatever insecurity this may have generated, it had been going on for a long time. Recent research using ground-penetrating radar has established that beaver dams and their changes to the Rockies landscape extend back thousands of years into the Holocene.[xiii]
Beaver have been frequently romanticized in popular works, including that of the Canadian writer Archibald Belaney, better known as Grey Owl, who had a storied life as a woodsman, trapper and later conservationist who became an advocate for beaver in the 1920s and 30’s. Hope Ryden recently related encounters with beaver in her book, Lily Pond.[xiv] Even more recently, we find a growing number of books available about beaver today and hundreds of scientific and popular articles that testify to the continuing interest in these animals and their works.
Recovery and Repatriation
In the previous article, we traced the long history of human exploitation of beaver to the point where populations in Eurasia existed only as isolated remnants, and those in the Americas were nearly so. From a conservatively estimated sixty million before European arrival, beavers were gone from many American states by 1900. Only slightly more than a quarter million were estimated to occur in the Continental U.S. and Alaska. The start of the twentieth century represented perhaps the “blackest dip” ever.[xv] From there, the road to recovery has been slow, helped along through laws that first prohibited and then regulated the taking of beaver for their pelts, as well as through considerable efforts on the part of state wildlife agencies and others to translocate beaver[xvi] for purposes ranging from the restocking of a harvestable resource to habitat restoration.[xvii] It is now estimated that the continental United States has roughly six to 12 million beaver.[xviii]
The commercial exploitation of the beaver had done more than decimate the population. It had destroyed a unique and timeless wetland landscape that the beaver created and sustained. The implications are far-ranging, and we are only beginning to wrap our heads around the loss. In providing both ecosystem services and acting as geomorphologic agents (not to mention serving as a keystone species[xix]), beaver exert enormous influence over the biotic community and the physical world. Beaver-created wetlands enhance biodiversity and habitat heterogeneity, modify nutrient cycling, and increase resistance to ecosystem perturbations on the biotic environment. Their wetlands trap and filter sediments, provide flood control and store water, and mitigate channel incision as influences on the physical environment[xx]. Other ideas and concepts, such as nitrogen farming,[xxi] mitigating the effects of climate change,[xxii] and preserving seed banks,[xxiii] have also been suggested and await further study. Even when no longer present, beaver can influence the land by leaving features such as the beaver meadow behind them.[xxiv]
These influences should be considered when we engage in planning and development initiatives. Beaver restoration and repatriation can only happen in pieces and in part, not to mention only in certain places. However, the idea that beaver return should be accompanied by serious and careful planning, together with a fair amount of celebration, is gaining momentum.
[i] Swetlitz, M. (1990). The Minds of Beaver and the Minds of Humans: Natural suggestion, natural selection, and experiment in the work of Lewis Henry Morgan. In G. W. Stocking (Ed.), Bones, bodies and behavior: Essays on behavioral anthropology (Vol. 5, pp. 56–84). Madison, WI: Univ of Wisconsin Press.
[ii] Morgan’s work could be credited as pioneering to either the American (Comparative Psychology) or European (Ethology) approach to the study of animal behavior, as it contains elements of both. Historians of those disciplines have typically not paid him much attention, perhaps because he was not an academic and never established a “school” of followers.
[iii] In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of the term to mid-sixteenth century sources, two of which remark on the sagacity of the beaver.
[iv] Morgan, L. H. (1843). Mind or instinct. The Knickerbocker, 22(5 & 6), 414–420; 507–515.
Johnston, T. D. (2002). An early manuscript in the history of American comparative psychology: Lewis Henry Morgan’s” Animal Psychology”(1857). History of Psychology, 5(4), 323–355.
[v] Or “brutes” in the oft-used terminology of the times.
[vi] Feeley-Harnik, G. (2021). Lewis Henry Morgan: American Beavers and Their Works. Ethnos, 86(1),21-43. Doi:10.1080/00141844.2019.1619605.
[vii] Kirksey, S. E., & Helmreich, S. (2010). The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology, 25(4), 545–576.
[viii] Gewertz, D., & Errington, F. (2015). Doing good and doing well: prairie wetlands, private property, and the public trust. American Anthropologist, 117(1), 17–31.
[ix] Manville, R. H. (1949). The fate of Morgan’s beaver. The Scientific Monthly, 69(3), 186–191.
[x] Johnston, C. A. (2015). Fate of 150-year-old beaver ponds in the Laurentian Great Lakes region. Wetlands, 35(5), 1013–1019.
[xi] Abbott, C. (1981). ” To Arouse Interest in the Outdoors”: The Literary Career of Enos Mills. Montana: The Magazine of Western History.
[xii] Warren, E. R. (1927). The Beaver: Its works and ways. Baltimore, MD: The Williams & Wilkins Company.
[xiii] Kramer, N., Wohl, E. E., & Harry, D. L. (2012). Using ground penetrating radar to ‘unearth’ buried beaver dams. Geology, 40(1), 43–46.
[xiv] Ryden, H. (1989). Lily Pond. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.
[xv] Seton, E. T. (Ed.) (1929). Lives of Game Animals (Vol. Volume IV – Part II). Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, Doran & Co. According to Seton, beaver were completely cleared from the immediate Mississippi Valley and all of the Eastern States except Maine as well southern parts of Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta by 1900.
[xvi] Heter, E. W. (1950). Transplanting beavers by airplane and parachute. Journal of Wildlife Management, 14(2), 143–147. This paper is often cited as evidence of a successful effort to introduce beaver into back country in Idaho, with seventy-six beavers dropped by parachutes in crates that opened on impact with ground, with only one casualty.
[xvii] Hill, E. P. (1987). Beaver restoration. In H. Kallman (Ed.), Restoring America’s Wildlife, 1937-1987: The First 50 Years of the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration (Pittman-Robertson) Act (pp. 283–285). Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
[xviii] Kwon, H. Y. (1997). The return of the beaver. Watershed Protection Techniques, 2(3), 405–410.
[xix] Hale, S. L., & Koprowski, J. L. (2018). Ecosystem‐level effects of keystone species reintroduction: a literature review. Restoration Ecology, 26(3), 439–445.
[xx] There is an extensive literature here going back to at least the 1930’s. To mention just a few:
Naiman, R. J., Johnson, C. A., & Kelley, J. C. (1988). Alteration of North American streams by beaver. BioScience, 38(11), 753–762.
Hammerson, G. A. (1994). Beaver (Castor canadensis): Ecosystem alterations, management, and monitoring. Natural Areas Journal, 14(1), 44–57.
Hey, D. L., & Philippi, N. S. (1995). Flood reduction through wetland restoration: the Upper Mississippi River Basin as a case history. Restoration Ecology, 3(1), 4–17.
Johnston, C. A., & Naiman, R. J. (1990). Aquatic Patch Creation in Relation to Beaver Population Trends. Ecology, 71(4), 1617–1621.
[xxi] Hey, D. L. (2002). Nitrogen farming: harvesting a different crop. Restoration Ecology, 10(1), 1–10.
[xxii] Hood, G. A., & Bayley, S. E. (2008). Beaver (Castor canadensis) mitigate the effects of climate on the area of open water in boreal wetlands in western Canada. Biological Conservation, 141(2), 556–567.
[xxiii] Le Page, C., & Keddy, P. A. (1998). Reserves of buried seeds in beaver ponds. Wetlands, 18(2), 242–248.
[xxiv] Ives, R. L. (1942). The beaver-meadow complex. Geomorphology, 5, 191–203. Ruedemann, R.& Schoomaker, W. J. (1938) Beaver dams as geologic agents, Science 88(2292): 523-535.