He always wore heavy leather gloves when he fed his beavers carrots or other treats. Those teeth were razor sharp and capable of felling large trees. Hank Bausch was a rancher, a beaver rancher in Central Wyoming.
Their numbers were once estimated as high as 400,000,000. The American beaver, scientific name Castor canadensis, was once native to all 48 contiguous states, along with all the Canadian provinces and Alaska. By 1840, the estimate was less than 100,000. The beaver was extinct in the Adirondacks and along the southern Atlantic Coast.
The fashion trend for beaver hats was responsible. It heralded the era of the Fur Trade with mountain men, trappers, and Native Americans gathering each year for rendezvous along the Green and Wind Rivers of Wyoming.
Another fashion trend brought the largest rodent in North America back in the early 20th century.
The beaver coat arrived alongside silver fox, wild mink, and ermine garments. These exorbitantly priced furs led to an industry resurgence.
Cody Enterprise March 21, 1928
Beaver farming
“Some five years ago the department issued a bulletin, Beaver Habits, Beaver Control and Possibilities in Beaver Farming, which went into the subject very thoroughly and, from the study of biological survey experts, presented the following conclusions.
Beavers are of primary importance as fur bearers and conservators of water and soil. Because of their unique habits they are also animals of general interest. In certain types of forest country, on farms, in irrigation ditches and along trails, roads and railroads, they are capable of doing serious damage. In such situations it becomes necessary either to remove them or to control them intelligently. Their control, however, is not difficult and where they are doing damage on private lands they can be quickly removed either by trapping alive for shipment or in the ordinary way for their fur.
If beavers are to be treated as public property, it is as objectionable to place them on private land where they will destroy crops and timber as it would be to turn herds of hogs and cattle into cultivated grain fields to fatten on what they like best. A thorough knowledge of their nature and habits is necessary for their control, as also for their successful culture.
Over a large part of our millions of acres of national forests beavers are capable of far more good than harm in conserving water and soil, weeding out timber of little value, making the silent places teem with interest, and yielding substantial returns in an annual fur harvest. With intelligent control to avoid local damage to valuable timber and other property and with wise restraint to prevent the dispersal of beavers over surrounding country, the usual complaints of damage can be eliminated.”
The motivation was purely financial, but beavers were instrumental in controlling floods for eons before the arrival of Europeans. The devastating floods in Colorado, along the Missouri Mississippi drainage and in Fremont County in 1921, had many remembering the lowly rodent as a means of controlling raging flood waters.
Beaver dams retained water in natural reservoirs, preventing drought and controlling runoff. They were useful all year long.
Conservation took a back seat to profit with the concept of beaver farms.
Beavers with the darkest fur were found along the southern shore of Lake Superior, in Wisconsin and Michigan. In other locales, the fur was lighter and less desirable. Light-furred pelts brought from $6 to $8 each; heavy, dark-brown skins from Canada and Alaska fetched $20 to $25. Rare black beaver pelts could bring as much as $50. Those prices reflect a value from $180 per pelt on the lower end to $1500 for black beaver pelts in today’s currency.
At the end of 1925, there were 2,161 fur farms in Canada, excluding beaver and muskrat. Canada and the northern states were ideal for fur production, which requires long, cold winters to produce luxurious coats. In Canada, the annual production of fur was nearly half a billion dollars in modern money.
By 1966, there were 65 beaver ranches operating in the United States. One of the last ones opening in Riverton in 1964 at the 78-acre farm of Henry “Hank” and Winnie Bausch.
Henry Granvel Bausch was born on July 26, 1916, in Franks, Missouri, in a family of 11 children.
“He wanted to come west,” his daughter Joy Ryan said.
In 1935, he left home with friends from Missouri who had a ranch in Boulder.
“My grandfather Elwin Mack had a sheep ranch near there,” Joy said. “He met my mother at a Saturday night dance at the Valhalla Hall in Pinedale.”
Winifred Marguerite “Winnie” Mack was born in Sublette County on February 13, 1921. The couple married in 1939 and moved to Jackson.
Hank went to work as a pumper.
“Dad worked in the oil field,” Joy said. “We moved a lot.
Joy was born in Cody.
“They decided it wasn’t good for me to move so much,” Joy said. “They settled in Worland. I was there from four until I graduated from the sixth grade.”
Hank moved his little family again, first to Cortez, Colorado, then to Vernal, Utah. Joy graduated from high school in Vernal.
“Neighbors started talking about beaver ranches in Salt Lake City,” Joy said. “They went to Salt Lake and toured some ranches.”
Hank was hooked. But so were some other investors whose ranches didn’t work out. The Bausch operation was successful, and with the combination of raising sheep adjacent to the beaver pens, they made a nice living.
In Salt Lake City, others weren’t so pleased.
Ahrens v. American-Canadian Beaver Co.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit July 15, 1970
Ahrens v. American-Canadian Beaver Co., 428 F.2d 926 (10th Cir. 1970)
Mark, Sally, Van, and Ted Weaver were owners of the American-Canadian Beaver Company. Plaintiffs claimed they’d been misled about the marketability of beavers and in the quality of breeding pairs the Weavers provided. After a trial, an appeal, and a following trial, they were found liable for misleading clients.
None of this affected Hank and Winnie’s operation.
Their original nesting pairs came from Canada, as trapping wild beavers for breeding is illegal in the United States.
They began looking for a ranch location near Riverton in 1964. They found a couple, but settled on a 78-acre parcel owned by Walter and Florence Meyers where Honor Farm Road and Smith Road intersect a few miles north of Riverton.
Florence was widowed, living in a cabin that had been brought down from the Japanese Internment Camp at Heart Mountain in the late 1940s. It had no well or electricity.
They moved the cabins west of their newly constructed home, and Florence lived there, now with water and electricity.
Hank began building beaver pens.
Riverton Ranger April 7, 1966
Couple Opens Ranch to Breed, Board Beaver
By Tom Hodge
“The ranch, which is owned and operated by Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Bausch, was begun about two years ago, but has been inhabited by beaver for just 18 months.
Specially designed pens had to be built by the Bausches when they purchased a place and the North American Beaver Association conducted an in-depth investigation of the Riverton couple before they were allowed beaver on the ranch.
The Bausch’s ranch was outfitted with a supply of beaver as the result of overflow from other association member ranches, just as they now supply the animals to new ranches.
Bausch was an oil field executive in Cortez, Colo., and Vernal, Utah before he and his wife moved to Riverton to start the ranch.
Mrs. Bausch says the new venture began like any business does, the bother of construction, the investment and so forth, but now it seems more like a hobby than a job, albeit a seven day a week hobby.”
Hank built 85 concrete beaver pens. Each pen had water flowing through it at about a gallon a minute.
“Anything faster than that and the beavers would start building dams,” Joy said. “The water flowed through six pens in a row before flowing into the ditch. It all ran on a well that pumped water 24 hours a day.”
The pens had three areas: a large open area, with a smaller “shake off” room where the beaver could shed water, and a small, dark nesting area where the kits were born.
The next box was packed with wood chips.
The ranch was a sort of beaver feed lot and breeding facility. Most of the beavers at the ranch were raised for the Weavers. With a few pairs owned outright by Hank and Winnie.
“With the 200 beaver we now have at the ranch, we don’t have room for some of our own animals. They are at an Arizona ranch, and we are waiting to make room here for them,” Hank said in a 1966 interview
Hank flew seven young beavers from Riverton on a Frontier Airlines flight to Salt Lake City for the world’s first beaver exposition. He came home with second and third-place ribbons.
“I found out later they didn’t judge quantity, they were looking for quality in the fur. I entered dark beaver, and that seemed to be what the judges were looking for,” Hank said.
Part of the daily routine was clearing dams from the water channels in each pen. That work, along with feeding and tending their flock of sheep, took its toll on Hank. His previous life as a pumper and driller in the oil field didn’t help. His hips began to fail. Six surgeries helped, but didn’t end the pain.
The local Riverton Co-Op brought in special beaver pellets for Hank. They also fed the beavers carrots, leaves, and branches.
Like all rodents, a beaver’s teeth grow constantly. Putting enough tree branches into the pens would lead to even more dams. Hank came up with a solution.
“Dad had a canvas bag that he put the beaver in,” Joy said. “Just their nose showed through the end. He’d take clippers and chip off their front teeth. The beavers got used to it and didn’t seem to mind.”
Another trick was to put a foot-long tree branch about eight inches in diameter into the pens. The beaver chewed through the middle. When they were finished, Hank tossed in another branch.
The Bausch’s didn’t harvest beavers. They sold their kits to other buyers or sent kits they raised for the Weavers back to Salt Lake City.
They didn’t skin many beavers at their place. When they did, it was an old breeding pair that was no longer fertile.
“A team would come out and slaughter the beavers,” Joy said. “They’d skin them and stretched hide into a big circle to dry.”
Circular hides were established 200 years ago by trappers so that the beaver pelts could be cured properly and were easier to transport.
In 1974, after his first hip replacement went poorly, Hank and Winnie sold the operation. Taking care of the beaver pairs was too painful for him. They continued to raise sheep.
On July 22, 2004, Hank passed away. Winnie passed on February 20, 2008.
In an interesting family twist, Hank and Winnie’s great-granddaughter, Mason Jacobson, is majoring in Wildlife Management at the University of Wyoming with a specialty in aquatic mammals, beavers.
She hopes to work for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department as an aquatic species biologist.
The wheel has gone full circle.
Not much is left of the beaver operation on Smith Road aside from the well house where millions of gallons of water flowed through the adjacent beaver pens for a decade from 1964 to 1974.
The market for fur is at an all-time low, and the wild beaver population is booming. In many areas of North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, they’re being transplanted back into their native habitat to improve water quality.
Once trapped to near extinction for fashion, the beaver is now valued for the landscapes it quietly builds.
North America’s largest rodent is making a comeback.