My great-great grand father John Perryman was a tin miner in St Austell Corwall England. When he was 49 he was lucky enough to be working with three of his grown sons in the Wheal Eliza mine. Now since John was an old man by miner standards he had the least qualified job of “trammer” who drove all the debris and rock the miners produced out of the shafts using a wagon. It was grueling work loading and unloading heavy cargo and I’m sure the more trips of this kind you made the better your dingy pay was.

in November of 1869 he made the trip for the last time. The wooden frame holding the path gave way and he was crushed under the wagon, Dying in the mine was not unexpected but was still a somber thing. Big enough deal  that an “inquiry” was conduced.

From Royal Cornwall Gazette 13th November 1869
Coroner’s Inquest John Perryman

“He wasimmediately carried home and a surgeon sent for, who on attending him gave no hopes of his recovery, on account of the severity of his injuries. The captain of the mine gave evidence to the effect that the wooden viaduct was not fit for use and was not in use, that deceased had no right or business there, therefore to a certain extent the accident was his own fault. A verdict of “Accidental death” was returned.”

Which means the inquiry was really more of a pagent, which I guess they often are when powerful bodies investigate themselves, I’m sure there was no one in St Austell that was surprised by the outcome.

Some times the deck is stacked, whether you are a miner or a beaver.

Officials find no wrongdoing in Park City beaver habitat removal

The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources investigated the removal of the beavers, and the Division of Water Rights investigated the removal of the dams. Both investigations found no wrongdoing.

However, the dam removed at McLeod Creek was not developed enough to be protected.

“In this case, there was no evidence of any heavy equipment in the channel itself,” Rasmussen said. “It looked like they did minimal damage in the removal of it. And therefore, it was determined that really no permit could be required for that.”

So you see, the dam was too little to matter, and the beavers too dead to protect. These things have a way of solving themselves, don’t you think? I believe Upton Sinclair said it best:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.“

My post on Friday about beavers being in “every river, brook and rill” prompted a lot of discussion and a genuinely knowledgeable comment from Evan the ecohydrologist who asked where it came from and

“I ask because that exact phase “every river, brook, and rill” was written by Harry Radford in 1907 in reference to the landscape of northern New York State. He presents these as his observations and assumptions, there’s no reason to believe he’s quoting Champlain. See “Eager” by Goldfarb, page 43-44 for a reprint of the Radford quote, or also the original Harry Radford 1907 “History of the Adirondack beaver” quote on page 396 of this citation:

Radford, Harry V. 1907. “History of the Adirondack Beaver: Its Former Abundance, Practical Extermination, and Reintroduction.” Annual Reports of the State of New York Forest, Fish, and Game Commissioner for 1904, 1905, 1906, pp 388–419. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100349977.

And my initial lightening storm of thoughts went something like this:as “Dam, that guy knows his stuff”  and “Oh boy am I stupid I don’t even know who I’m quoting” and then defensively “Jeeze I’m doing my best here and it’s not like I get paid for this or the website costs you anything” and then seamlessly “WOW the website has a long time reader! Someone actually reads this that isn’t related to me!”

Okay, then i put all those thoughts on a shelf to think about  later and I went searching through the site to find where I thought the quote came from and I saw articles where I quoted it in 2015 and before that in 2012 and before that in 2010 and before that in 2009! Which I’m sure you’ll agree is  very long time ago. November 2009 was the first time it appeared on this website in a post called “Where have all the beavers gone?” which preceeded even our historic papers.

Obviously that was before Ben’s book and before Frances book and before Leila’s book and before I had read much of anything about beavers at all except for Dietland Muller Swarze book which I had browsed on a plane on the way back from a APA conference on assessing family violence in divorce in my old life as a shrink. A LONNNNG time ago.

So I wandered through the november posts for that year to figure out what I had read that prompted me to write that and I found  one aptly called “Revelations” where I was just starting to read Lily Pond by Hope Ryden and was struck by the historical writing she did where she found out that beavers used to enjoy life in the sunshine before the trapping obsession forced them to become nocturnal. Then I looked up her book and found this: on page 46 of Lily Pond to be precise:

So there it is. Hope was writing about what Samuel De Champlain saw and she used the evocative writing of Henry  Radford in the early 1900s who specfically said beavers inhabited every “River Brook and Rill” and  was probably translating Samuels words when he said that in 1622 the adirondacks were “peopled” with beaver.

So it was my mistake to combine the two but a fairly understandable one and I could tell exactly why I made it, Hope got interested in the idea because she noticed that beavers didn’t have eyeshine like other nocturnal animals. And when she read up on it she realized that they used to be out in the day and became nocturnal when they were ruthlessly trapped. In fact by 1895 many states reported they no longer had beavers.

“One can speculate that the few animals that escaped this continent-wide decimation must have been the wariest of their kind, deviants, disinclined to build conspicuous lodges. And inded, the late ninteeth-century reports of sightings describe the beaver as a reclusive bank-dweller. One can also speculate that these survivors escaped the notice of trappers by turning night into day, for by the end of the last century, no further mention is made of beavers “sunning themselves on their lodges”.

Hope Ryden: The Lily Pond pg 48

Even though when Samuel De Champlain toured the adirondacks in 1623 there were beaver in every “River, Brook and Rill” according to Harry Radford who described the decimation of beavers three hundred years later.

I’m so happy to finally get it sorted, Thank you Hope, Harry and Evan!

The french cartographer and founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, once wrote that beavers in the new world in 1600 occupied “Every River. Brook and Rill.”

I was thinking in particular about this sentence about the word “Rill” which isn’t used much today in conversation today but does still have a specific geomorphological meaning. Wikipedia defines a rill as “a shallow channel (no more than a few inches deep) cut into soil by the erosive action of flowing surface water. “

It occurs to me that when you’re a child making an ambitious sand castle at the beach and you and your cousin scoop a long trench from the waves to your creation in the hopes of bringing water to your moat that this is a kind of manmade “rill”.

And more importantly when beavers dig canals out from a pond to extend their territory to reach more trees and have an easy way to haul them back that is also a RILL. In fact a rill might be described as a path where water will go when the right conditions arise. What we today would refer to as an “Ephemeral stream“.

I am thinking that Ephemeral just means “without beavers“.