The beaver: the trade's first casualty, the park's engineer

1880 to 2006

The going: In Chapman's departure list the beaver stands second, ahead of the elk: "With or before it went the beaver" — gone from the county, on the county history's word, by 1880, taken by the same fur trade that had made Fort St. Joseph's a counting house a century before. The National Park Service's account of the neighboring Dunes country states the state frame in the same terms: the beaver was extirpated from Indiana by the end of the fur trade, gone from the state for a hundred years, and the Indiana DNR released beaver back into the Dunes area in the 1970s.

The return, at county size: This county's documented modern beaver record is a park census. In 2006 the South Bend Tribune, reporting the beaver's comeback, put Potato Creek State Park's population in its naturalist's figures: about eight beaver colonies, or approximately sixty-four beavers, in the park — Tim Cordell's count, printed with its own hedge ("the exact number is unknown"). The entry is short because the county record reached is short: colonies at work in the park's creeks and ponds, felling and damming on Potato Creek itself, in the southwest county — the animal that built the fur trade's first ledger, back at its trade inside a state park, six miles of creek at a time. No city riverwalk beaver record, no removal controversy, and no dated first-return year for the county was found in the sources reached, and none is printed.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, p. 340.
2. National Park Service, Indiana Dunes National Park, "Beavers" — extirpated from Indiana by the end of the fur trade; Indiana DNR releases in the Dunes area in the 1970s.
3. "Born builders: Beavers make comeback, keep busy doing what comes naturally," South Bend Tribune (2006) — the Potato Creek colonies and count, per naturalist Tim Cordell (the article as catalogued in the Michiana-area newspaper index).