These ponds sometimes lay directly across the line of our survey and inconvenienced us greatly. We disliked to make "offsets" in our lines and thus go around the dam, for the traveling in such places was usually very slow and tedious. The saving of time is always important to the land hunter, since he must carry his provisions, and wishes to accomplish all that is possible before the last day's rations are reached. It was not strange, then, if we first tried the depth of the water in the pond by wading and feeling our way. While we could keep our pack sacks from becoming wet, we continued to wade toward the opposite shore, meantime remembering or keeping in sight some object on the opposite shore, in the direct course we must travel, which we had located by means of our compass before entering the water. Sometimes a retreat had to be made by reason of too great depth of water. During the summer months we did not mind simply getting wet clothes by wading; but once in the fall just before ice had formed, this chilly proposition of wading across, was undertaken voluntarily, and was only one of many uncomfortable things that entered into the woodsman's life.
Subjected thus to much inconvenience and discomfort by those valuable little animals, we could but admire their wisdom in choosing places for their subaqueous homes. They feed upon the bark of the alder, the poplar, the birch, and of some other trees. These grew where they constructed their dam and along the margin of the pond of water thus formed. They cut down these trees by gnawing entirely around their trunks, then they cut off branches and sections of the trunks of the trees, and drew them into their houses under the ice. Most trees cut by the beaver are of small diameter. I once measured one beaver stump and found it to be fourteen inches in diameter. I still have in my possession a section of a white cedar stump measuring seventeen inches in circumference that had been gnawed off by beavers. It is the only cedar tree I have ever known to have been cut down by these wise little creatures.
Flambeau Farm was located on the right bank of Chippewa River opposite the mouth of Flambeau River. There old man Butler kept a ranch for the especial accommodation of lumbermen and land hunters, who included nearly everyone who came that way. It was at the end of the wagon road leading from Chippewa Falls and from other civilized places. Canoes, dugouts, batteaus--all started from Butler's ranch at Flambeau Farm for operations up the Flambeau and its tributaries, or for either up or down the Chippewa and its branches.