Running a Successful Trapline in 2023

It had been fifty years since I’d run a trapline, and I’d never done it solo. Now my skills were called upon once again. This time, I’d be on my own. Here’s a Jack London tale for our times…

My father Max taught my year-younger brother Tony and me many of his outdoor ways. Dad had learned a lot from his father, my Grandpa Devere Grover. 

Growing up, Dad had trapped on the unnamed trickle that tumbled through Carl Peterson’s pasture. It fed Bear Creek, a stream once renowned for smallmouth bass. Dad fished there often as a kid. And with brother Guy, Dad hunted whitetail deer along the Wapsi River bluffs that uncle Guy owned. (The property is now managed by the Buchanan County Conservation Board, downriver from “the Old Iron Bridge” halfway between Independence and Quasky. It’s awkwardly named “Guy Grover Timber and Tree Plantings.”). 

When Tony and I were about nine or ten, Grandpa Devere had a problem.  In mid-spring as the ground warmed, gopher mounds popped up in his oatfield. Pocket gophers are a normal agricultural nuisance, and found in (ever-disappearing) hayfields, pastures, and fence rows. They are named after the cheek pouches they use to transport plant roots as they forage underground.  They’re worth learning about for their environmental benefits.

Gophers are smaller cousins to prairie dogs, and prey for foxes and badgers. If a gopher pops their head out at the wrong time, a redtail hawk might enjoy their company for lunch. Not as a guest, though.

In the late sixties, our family still lived in Rowley, a 250ish-population town a mile east of Grandpa and Grandma Grover’s place. Dad was the rural mail carrier, running the same dusty route Grandpa had driven for nearly forty years. 

To help Grandpa clear out his varmints, Dad introduced us boys to trapping. We focused on the freshly-dug mounds. After clearing the mound soil, we uncovered a hole that branched off into two tunnels. We placed a small steel trap at the junction, carefully sprinkled it with a little dirt to hide it, and covered the hole with old license plates. Then we replaced the original mound soil.

Grandpa paid us a quarter for each “dispatched” gopher. The Buchanan county courthouse also paid quarter bounties for each delivered pair of front gopher feet. We saved the clawed appendages in Gerber baby jars, and between our two revenue streams netted three or four bucks.

In March, 1969, my folks bought Carl Peterson’s 100-acre farm at an estate auction for $305/acre. We moved right before my 12th birthday, watching the Apollo moon landing at our farmhouse with my grandparents.

Our east forty included a boggy pasture. Along the fence we shared with Norman Rosene flowed an unnamed stream, sometimes called Donkey creek. It bubbled up from a hillside spring near Richard Hare’s old gravel pit, not far from our east property line. And Dad now owned the “crick” stretch he trapped as a kid.

By the late sixties, farming had begun a revolution. Wildlife had begun disappearing in rural Iowa from when Dad was a kid in the 1940s. 

For example, Rowley’s Methodist Men group hosted an opening-day pheasant hunt for several years. Excited hunters and their antsy shorthairs arrived from Waterloo and Cedar Rapids. They gathered in the church basement for a hearty Methodist housewife-prepared pancake breakfast. Fueled by weak Folgers coffee, the  hunters paired up with a local.  They were guided to prime pheasant habitat where a property owner had granted the church exclusive opening-day hunting privileges. The big city boys often bagged their limits before noon. 

But there weren’t enough birds to justify continuing the tradition by the late sixties. Fewer hayfields and pastures and marshes, too few pheasants. You’d be even more hard-pressed to find any ringnecks there today.  

On opening day of trapping season in November, 1969, Dad began teaching us boys how to creek-trap. On his birthday the following year, Tony and I caught our first mink at a clay tile outlet in our pasture. 

Trapping in the fall of 1973 was as shit-crazy memorable as everything else that was going on. KCRG’s TV tower fell three miles south of us, killing five and making the national news. I played tight end on an undefeated Independence Mustang football team. Nixon executed his “Saturday Night Massacre”. My favorite singer Jim Croce died in a Louisiana plane crash.  At least we still had the Allmans and Al Green and Steely Dan on the radio. 

And that fall, Tony and I harvested an insane number of furbearers in three weeks, all along a few pastoral miles on an unnamed creek. 

We set mink and raccoon traps at clay tile outlets, sometimes baited with kipper snacks. They are Nordic-sourced canned herring that Dad sometimes snacked on with soda crackers.  Curious mink and hungry coons were always looking for fish, and kippers made an effective lure. 

There were two ways to trap muskrats. Game trails led from the creek bank into nearby cornfields.  We set spring traps where the trail entered the stream, staking the chain into deeper water. If caught, a muskrat would be pulled into the current and drown.  

Conibear traps were fairly new in the early 70s. They were placed outside holes that had been dug into the creek bank. The underwater entryways led to muskrat dens. Conibears were set vertically and designed to kill right away. 

Muskrats were plentiful. Leland Corkery loved to bitch about “mushrats” that were seemingly devouring half his cornfield. Fake news, like the kids call it these days. But he wasn’t totally wrong. He had several damaged corn rows along his tiny slice of the creek.

Opening day for trapping was the first Saturday in November. Dad, Tony and I were dropped off by Mom at the highway 150 bridge a mile west of our house.  Max Grover guided his boys to the best spots for setting traps. He knows more about outdoor stuff than most anyone I’ve ever met.

Walking east and upstream toward home, we didn’t set many traps along Warren Pratt’s channel-straightened stretch. The stream angled to the southeast as it passed onto Elsie’s land, with deeper holes and brushier cover. Good habitat.

Elsie Prahm was a widow who remained on the farm her in-laws had originally owned. She cooked raccoon for us once, like she had done during the Depression. She said you had to make sure to remove a scent gland. Tasted roast-pork good. One summer I ignorantly mowed over Elsie's flowering strawberry plants. She was rightfully pissed but forgave me. I still feel bad about that.  

Bob Muchmore owned a pasture in the next upstream stretch. The channel here had also been straightened and the corn was further away, not making it worth trapping. Eventually the creek flowed under a boxy concrete culvert bridge, a quarter mile down road from our house. It then angled northeast and into Dad’s boggy, soggy pasture and upward to its source. Other than some occasional cow shit, the stream flowed clear and summertime-chilly as it tumbled over a mostly gravel bottom.

Our total trapline was about two miles long. We set between fifteen and twenty traps, and pulled them in a few days if they weren’t producing.  Weather for the first few trapping days was cloudy but mild. On those nights (and depending on the moon), critters are especially active. Some mornings we’d have a dozen muskrats. 

On school days, we’d get up at 5:30. Mom would fill us with Quaker oatmeal and Nestle’s Quik hot cocoa before dropping us off at the 150 bridge. A low crimson rose as we slogged water and tromped the creekbank. Frosty air stung my cheeks. Thin snot rivulets were wiped off on my shooter’s mittens, made from a deer hide Dad had shot. 

One morning we found two drowned muskrats, both captured in the same trap by a hind foot.  Another time we caught a muskrat and reset the Conibear trap. Less than a minute later, it snapped. We had a second muskrat. And once as we crossed Bob Muchmore’s pasture, Tony saw a skunk ambling down a harvested corn row. He chased it with a club. I had really hoped he’d get sprayed, but the skunk got away. 

Fur buyers don’t pay much less for unskinned animals. So after supper, we took our bounty into the unfinished farmhouse basement. This was before the folks remodeled, and there weren’t any suitable outbuildings for skinning at the time. The cellar walls had a fieldstone foundation with a ceiling built for earlier-time shorter people. I banged my head more than once.

Dad and Tony did the skinning. Muskrats and raccoons had fat that needed to be removed from the pelt, a process called fleshing. I gently scraped off white fat-globs with a butter knife and tossed them in a five-gallon bucket. After fleshing, we stretched the pelts on either a specially designed wire frame (for muskrats) or a small thin board (mink) for drying. 

Around Thanksgiving, the creek had frozen and traps had been pulled. Hides were dried and ready for market.  After Dad got home from hauling mail one weeknight, we loaded his dusty Galaxie 500 route car with our season’s catch. An hour later we were in the Iowa River bottoms near Chelsea and met fur buyer Ludwig Sheda. Dad had sold pelts to him before.

Fifty years ago, there was still a booming international fur trade market. Muskrat pelts ranged from $3 to $3.50, depending on their size and quality. A prime mink could fetch twenty bucks or more. Coons sold for $8-10, about the same for badgers. If you were lucky, you’d snag you a quarter or fifty cents for skunks or possums. They weren’t skinned for at least one obvious reason. 

In November, 1973, we caught over 130 muskrats, a dozen raccoons, eight mink, and a few skunks/possums/barn rats (barn rats didn’t sell). Tony and Dad had trapped a couple foxes and a badger or two. A prime fox pelt could be worth up to forty dollars. 

Those were 1973 dollars, worth nearly seven dollars today. Fifty years ago, I made between $300-400 in about three weeks…or about $2500 in 2023 money. I bought a Remington 1100 shotgun that hasn’t been fired in thirty years…I’m now more into shooting photography than animals. 

Don’t encourage your wee ones to become trappers. The days of bountiful riches are long gone. Trapping Today magazine predicts 2023 raccoon pelts may bring five bucks…less than two dollars for muskrats…and “wild mink” (vs “”ranch mink) might fetch $5-6. A nice fox may net you fifteen. So don’t bother picking up roadkill if you were so inclined, at least not for the pelts. 

Circling back to my parents, I’m happy to report Dad just celebrated his 88th birthday. He and his 91 ½ year old bride Charlotte–aka MOM–still live on their lovely farm with a robust walnut grove and great view of the southern sky.  They’ve been married 69 ½ years, and both are in reasonably good health. My sister Diane keeps a good eye on them.

Now about that modern-day trapline I alluded to earlier…my wife Deb recently discovered a furbearer in our home. A…mouse. 

Nobody wants beady eyed varmints gnawing on their Aldi’s granola boxes. But Deb elevates mouse paranoia to a higher level. She’d rather bathe in a tub full of rattlesnakes than touch  a mouse (dead or alive). Her mother, Marie, would scream and scramble onto the dining room table when she saw one. In fairness, Marie Wilberding once encountered a mouse in her sweater sleeve. 

Last week while hanging with three-year old grandson Owen, Deb saw a mouse scurry along the living room baseboard and into the kitchen. She wisely didn’t scream. Had she told Owen, he’d want to track it down for adoption and make it his new “best fwend.”

Remember that old saying about building a better mousetrap?  There are lotsa options these days. The New York Times even reviewed “The 5 Best Mouse Traps of 2023.”  Rodent capturing has long-evolved from the cheap wooden spring traps of my youth. They always snapped in your hand just as you were placing them.

Deb picked up some “Victor Quick-Kill Mouse Traps” (model M140C if you’re keeping score) at Menards. They are simply designed and deadly. You don’t have to touch the mouse to remove it, and you don’t need an engineering degree to set it. 

After discovering a rodent portal under the kitchen sink (evidenced by rice-sized turds), we caught a mouse the following morning. And another the next day. We sealed up an outside hole this weekend with a combination of steel wool and glumpy expired caulk. My loving wife did a thorough cleaning of anywhere the little varmints may have visited. The traps have remained set and unsprung for about a week. 

We’re now ready to host Thanksgiving this coming Saturday.  I’m hoping a mouse doesn’t appear while everyone’s here. The table will be too crowded for screamers!

Happy Holidays!  🙂

Tim and Tony Grover with their November 1973 fur harvest. This was taken by my dad on the west side of our old hoghouse. That’s sister Diane’s shadow on the right. About 130 muskrat pelts hang between the two foxes. We also caught about a dozen coon, eight mink, and a skunk or two.