Beaver camp

This post should have been made last Feb. , better late than never I guess.

My good freinds from northern Louisiana have this amazing place to play on. Unmolested, we can have all the fun four trappers really need to have. This year was suppose to have been more people, but that don't always happen, and it rained a bunch. The sloughs, backwaters, and creeks really camp up high. I set two traps the day before the rains came, the next morning they were 8 foot under water, no beaver of course.
We held off setting anymore traps until the rain stopped. The next problem would be how to judge the water levels , would they recede fast or slow?
It was a judgement call that I think many trappers encountered in history. Take a given water level, make a set and judge where the water will be the next day. You want to make sure you have enough water to drown a beaver, but also the trap bed has to be correct.
I made a poor judgement in setting one of mine too deep , I lost my beaver, the trap was moved and appears I caught a toenail. My trapping pard, Ron Butler judged the other way and had little drowning water, his beaver chewed out.
It was still a learning experience, and thats what we were after. The traps worked fine, we just judged our water levels wrong. I feel like the same concerns would have been encountered in history, and probably judged more correctly.
We did make a few land sets with the new leaf spring traps I made. There was much to learn again while using these. The long bar on these traps were noted as being a problem area, for coon especially. Right away, the wet ground was seen as the challenge. You couldn't bury the bar, for the wet dirt was holding the spring back. Being 24 inches long, it made an obvious "something is buried here" getting the curiosity of a coon real quick.
Knowing he would likely dig the trap up and toss it aside, i cut a channel just wide enough that the bar would set in it. Then covered it with loose leaves, adding a heavy broken limb over the bar lengthwise, making it real hard to divert the coon to it as he has more important things like bait to look for. The limb doesn't touch the spring, it just lays over the channel , giving the spring all the room it needs.
Something still went wrong , the next morning I found tracks around the set, but nothing would go to it. With all the messing around trying to figure out how to make a perfect set I probably left too much scent behind. Maybe next time I'll get it done right and get off the trap bed without leaving my prescence behind. Had it not rained so much, there would have been more days to work traps, with the limited amount of time, there was only one decent night of trapping.

New thoughts from an old book.

I haven't even tried to maintain this blog like I should, maybe I'm just off to a slow start. It's been a weird winter, or maybe I should say weird season. We had no winter at all, but fur wasn't all bad, and I did get to trap a few times. In between making traps and other goods I made the trip to northern Lousiana and trapped with my buddies, we were rained out , the beaver even ran for high ground. It was still fun as usual.
For the history endeavour , there has been more thought about the older methods of trapping. Now that some of us are understanding the older traps, it's time for the methods of trapping.
On the subject of landsets, there isn't much to offer in the journals about landsets. In fact there isn't much of any trapping other than beaver. One quote from Townsends journal I found interesting this year:
20th.‘
Yesterday one of the Canadians took an enormous wolf in a beaver-trap. It is probably
a distinct species from the common one, (lupus,) much larger and
stronger, and of a yellowish cinereous color. The man states that he found
considerable difficulty in capturing him, even after the trap had been fastened
on his foot. Unlike the lupus, (which is cowardly and cringing when made
prisoner,) he showed fight, and seizing the pole in his teeth, with which the
man attempted to despatch him, with one backward jerk, threw his assailant to
the ground, and darted at him, until checked by the trap chain. He was finally
shot, and I obtained his skin, which I have preserved. – Townsend.

I like this quote, and for this trapper to be making landsets could mean he has done it before on occassions. Also what Townsend will do with that hide could be interesting to know..

In the search for more period methods of making both water sets and landsets, I found an online book , The Trappers Guide, by Sewell Newhouse. I had this bookmarked for a few months and just now getting around to reading on it.

http://books.google.com/books?id=lrcUAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA113&ots=FhhbljZo-D&dq=sewell%20newhouse%20trap%20history&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q=sewell%20newhouse%20trap%20history&f=false

It's 1865, although thats a little off the mark for our fur trade, possibly this will add clues to how the 1830's trappers did things.
On page 17, the mention of a "clog" , a pole or limb used as a trap drag. I have yet to see a clear example of a trap drag made out of metal, similar to a grapling hook. Most appear to have been added to the old traps still in use way up into the 1900's.
My good freind Cody Livingston from Louisiana taught me a new trick. This could be the answer to pan coverings. At trapping camp he broke out pieces of sheered wool, or greasy wool it's called when it's taken right off the lambs. He uses this under his pan, so there's no need for screen mesh, or cloth duck. It's claimed that the lanolin from the wool also helps attract varmints. In Newhouse's book, under the section for trapping fox , he mentions using wool sheared. I'm actually excited to see this in use at the time of this book, possibly this is leading to a documented find for the 1830's.
Also Newhouse mentions the use of beeswax to coat a trap , however he is referring to scent masking , instead of waterproofing and rust preventing as we do today.
There is much more to study in this book, it's worth the time to read.