Young Trappers Head South For Mississippi Beaver 'Line

My best friend Paul Buehler and I were a couple of 19-year-old kids looking for a new place to trap. But the high price of fur in 1980 was making it hard to find such places around home.

- Larry Edwards

I had heard that parts of Mississippi were overrun with beaver and contacted their department of conservation. Someone sent me info on a co-op that put trappers in contact with landowners. So, off we went to Mississippi in a camper borrowed from Paul’s brother. The nonresident license was only good for a specific area, so after looking over the landowners on the co-op list, we settled on the area around Tombigbee National Forest.

The campground was closed when we arrived at 8 p.m., so we parked alongside the road. About 7 a.m. a park ranger knocked on our door. He asked us what we were doing in Mississippi, and we told him we had come to trap beaver.

“Have I got a deal for you,” he replied with a grin. “If you boys trap the beaver in the park, you can camp all winter for free. I’ll even give you a map of the fire lanes and a key to the gate.”

Divine intervention right from the get-go, and the first day in the park we found the biggest beaver dam either of us had ever seen. It stretched almost 1/4-mile long, stood 4 feet tall, and was so old the bottom had turned into dirt.