>>2717550The entire Midwest of the US used to be a loosely connected series of beaver ponds as was much of the south west and west. Pre western expansion having a beaver pond on the river was much more common than having a river with no beavers.
The hundreds of millions of beavers that were eradicated to make hats and harvest their anal glands for scents and flavoring were so successful in the mid west that they had dominated one of the biggest watersheds on earth (the US Midwest) significantly improving it's soil (which is why it's still usable for farming today) as well as helping to create one of the largest swamps (now completely gone).
The push to clear the midwest wetlands was two fold--first they butchered hundreds of millions of beavers and then they turned what once were massive spreads of beaver habitat into literal drainage ditches.
Industrealization made it all so much more efficent and now everyone forgets that America used to be dominated by wetlands created by beavers.
They were so effective at obliterating beavers that many people in California believed Beavers weren't even native to California even though the entire central valley used to be covered in wetlands and marshes.
Much of what is now "arid land" in the US was made arid in reticent times by hunters and trappers.
