seventy-one men equipped with 364 traps: "Each beaver trap last year in the Snake Country averaged 26 beavers. Was expected this hunt will be 14,000 beavers." Two years later in the Harney country, a band of six trappers averaged from fifty to sixty beavers a day. As late as 1860 many of the Eastern Oregon streams were "thronged with beavers," but later the animals were almost exterminated. During the last quarter century, however, due to rigid protective laws, they have increased in numbers until colonies are now found in many counties of the State.
The king of the Oregon forests is the cougar, and in many sections still lives the black bear, venerated by the early Indians and reverently called "grandfather." Some tribal myths taught that the bear was the ancestor of all Indians. In rare instances is found the fierce grizzly or silvertip, the great "white bear" of Lewis and Clark.
Most abundant among the larger animals are members of the deer family—the Columbian black-tailed of mountain and coastal forest; the larger mule deer, an inhabitant of the dryer Eastern Oregon sections; elk or wapiti in the Wallowa region and the coast mountains; and, in the extreme southeast part of the State, some of the largest remaining herds of pronghorns or American antelope, graceful and fleet.
In the southeast, also, numerous skeletal remains of the buffalo have been found, and small bands of bighorn or Rocky Mountain sheep still inhabit the wild crags of the Wallowa Range.
The Cascade timber wolf continues in some numbers, but the chief representative of the wolf clan is the shy and crafty coyote.
Oregon has a number of interesting smaller animals. The porcupineis common in almost all sections at high altitudes, as is the peculiar mountain beaver or sewellel, not a true beaver but a burrowing rodent, which seems to have no very close allies elsewhere in the world. Woodland sections are inhabited by varieties of wood rats, called by the natives "pack" or "trade" rats because of their predilection for carrying off small articles and leaving in their stead a pine cone, a nut, or a shiny pebble as apparent compensation. At very high altitudes lives the pika—little chief hare or cony—rock-inhabiting creatures that gather and dry large amounts of "hay" for winter provender. Chipmunks, squirrels, hares, and rabbits are numerous. Jackrabbits in the sage lands, like the stars above, frustrate all census takers because they "count too high." An Italian settler in Eastern Oregon left the country and gave gastronomic reasons for doing so: "I no like da Eastern Org. No sphagett, no macarone, too mucha jacka-da-rab."
