One of my favorite pastimes is using primary sources such as letters, diaries, old account books, and news stories to interpret the past. Learning about history directly from someone who lived it sparks an interest that brings that era to life better than any textbook can. You can imagine the fun a retired English teacher and self-professed Cather geek is having reading The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

Once I got over the guilt of reading postings my favorite author never intended for public consumption, I’ve relished every letter. I particularly enjoyed those offering insights into O Pioneers! My Antonia, A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, Song of the Lark, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Her business correspondence reveals how involved this artist was involved in everything from the selection of covers, paper, fonts, and artwork and fascinates me. More personal missives disclose that she loved the West and those who called it home. Here’s a woman who left Nebraska to spend most of her life navigating life in the world’s largest cities. Despite her urban prowess, she tells one mail recipient that she’s “just a corn farmer.” In other notes, she details Southwest adventures and how she hopes her novels set in that locale make its beauty clear to those who’ve never visited.

Her letters aren’t terse communications. She writes so that you sense you’re eavesdropping on private conversation. I loved when she explained how novels poured from her pen. In one passage she mentions how writing is akin to channeling as if she’s the receiver of otherworldly signals. Though she’s been gone decades, I feel like I’m chatting with a friend to learn how her artistic process works.

In addition to insights into this Nebraska novelist’s published collections, Cather offers tidbits about life in the early 1900s. Her readers view Pittsburg, New York, Europe, and Red Cloud to learn about theater, opera, magazine editing, setting up apartments, socializing, and eventually World War I through her observant lens. Her commentary about editing is so frank that I’m sure she’s spinning in her grave to think private words are now public. Her anecdotes about France after the war personalize that tragedy more clearly than anything except battlefield photos can.

As I savor this peek into the past, it makes me wonder what future students of history will lose now that so few of us compose beautifully written conversations with friends, loved ones, and colleagues. Digital contacts are typically brief and to the point, sharing few insights into a writer’s character. Besides, once a computer program is outdated, it’s difficult to access stored material. How many of us have floppy discs we can’t open?

It’s a thrill to crawl inside the mind of a writer I’ve loved since I was a teen. However, this time machine made of postal notes sets off noisy alarms. Good historical research requires access to primary sources. If we have no well-written letters and journals for future historians to examine, scholars lose personal perspectives into the era they study. What a loss!

Native Kansan Karen Madorin is a local writer and retired teacher who loves sharing stories about places, people, critters, plants, food, and history of the High Plains.

We older outdoor sportsmen are frequently reminded of the importance of passing on our love and knowledge of the outdoors to the younger generations. I usually fail miserably in that department. I’m the kind of guy who is quite happy by myself and I don’t need a lot of conversation, so it just seems easier to head out the door to set or check traps, to hunt turkeys or deer or to just knock around in the woods entirely by myself or with my wife Joyce.

Last spring, I wrote a column about a young McPherson lad, Jared Austin, who is on the Pheasants Forever National Youth Leadership Council. When we first talked, Jared expressed an interest in learning more about trapping and I promised to meet him at the Kansas Fur Harvesters convention (which was in McPherson a month ago) and help him get some equipment, then to help him learn coyote trapping this fall. Well, wouldn’t you know, after five years of applying I got a Kansas antelope tag this year and the season when I’d be hunting fell on the exact weekend of the Fur Harvesters Convention. The president of the KS Fur Harvesters does a lot with trapping education and was glad to meet Jared, and helped him get what he needed to trap this year. Now the ball was squarely in my court again to help him get started.

I got a call from Jared last week telling me the McPherson Golf Course was having beaver problems, and asked if I’d be interested in trying to catch the perpetrator(s). Another trapper caught and removed several from the golf course last spring, but suddenly new chewing was showing up, so evidently at least one beaver had not gotten the eviction notice.

I put together traps and equipment and met Jared at the golf course shop where we hopped a golf cart and followed the superintendant around to look at the beaver’s handiwork. A manmade creek runs the length of the course and new trees were being chewed and cut down along its bank. The creek is fairly deep making it very difficult to find beaver’s dens or travel ways. We were using large beaver-sized body grip traps that the critters swim or walk through, so we set one in the water at the base of a slide being used by the beaver to crawl in and out of the water just below a 4 inch diameter tree it had recently cut completely down and stripped of its bark. We went to the other side of the creek and set one in a spot narrowed down by a big brush pile, hoping we could entice the bugger to swim through the trap to get to a stick dipped in beaver lure.

I wasn’t feeling too confident with either of those two locations, but the options seemed few. As we walked the banks I spotted a slight indentation along the bank that gave me an idea. Male beavers are very territorial and occasionally scrape together piles of mud which they mark with a musky smelling secretion from glands near the base of their tail called castor glands. This secretion known as “castor” marks their chosen territory much like a whitetail buck uses a scrape on the ground. These castor mounds can be replicated and scented with beaver lure to entice male beavers to stop and investigate, and the indentation along the bank was a good spot to try that. With a shovel I dug a short channel, piling the mud into a pile on the bank at the upper end of the channel. I placed a trap in the water at the entrance to the channel, dabbed a stick with lure and stuck it into the pile of mud. The idea is get the beaver to swim through the trap as he investigates the strange new odor in his territory. I had more confidence in this setup than I did in the other two.

Since Jared lives in McPherson just minutes away from the golf course, he offered to check the traps each morning, saving me the drive. Bright and early Friday morning my phone chimed, informing me of a new text; it was Jared telling me that one Mr. Beaver had fallen for the new “imaginary” intruder into his domain and was caught in the trap at our castor mound. I met him there and removed the beaver, which appeared to have been a loner since we caught no other the rest of the week.

Several years ago I caught a huge beaver in an old castor mound I found along the river. I remade it with additional mud and juiced it up with some scent and snagged the big male beaver the first night. In fact, one of my best stories ever described the hilarious antics of Joyce and I getting the monstrous beast dragged up the bank out of the river and across 200 yards of alfalfa field to the truck. And since that was my first beaver ever, it seems only fitting Jared should help catch his first the same way. Continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors.

Steve Gilliland, Inman, can be contacted by email at [email protected].

As we find ourselves so near to Election Day, we’re seeing countless attack mailers, radio ads, and commercials. It is imperative that the people of Kansas remain focused on the real issue – Sam Brownback. It is he who has caused our economy to plummet, he who was behind the tax cuts for the wealthy and LLCs, the tax hikes on the middle class, the slashing of the budget for schools and every agency in the state.

The root of all of the problems in Kansas is our own governor. We must fight back. We must vote out Brownback’s allies in the legislature. We must vote for judicial retention. We must elect principled Democrats. We must steer Kansas in a new direction – and it starts with you. With your votes, we can end Brownback’s reign of terror over our state. Your vote is your voice. Use it.

Kerry Gooch
Executive Director
Kansas Democratic Party
Topeka