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I got the idea from the radio, this being around 1950 when I was 8 years old, before we had a television, from the 'Sergeant Preston of the Yukon' radio drama about the Northwest Mounted Police. Many of the characters were fur trappers. I remember one show, there was a fight in a cabin and a goldfish in a bowl got knocked off the table and they didn't pick it up and I became extremely upset about that. Perhaps a couple years later I decided that I would be a trapper and make money. My mother said she knew someone who would buy my pelts for one dollar apiece, which was big money in those days, and I being very imaginative became instantly rich.
May have been the year we moved to my grandfather's house on the island, which was across the channel from my father's house where we had lived for about two years. So I looked in the Sear's catalog at the trapping paraphernalia, and got my mother to send off for some traps and stretchers to dry the hides. What I was going to do was trap Muskrat. These were never seen but we knew they were there because of the mounds in the swamp and the holes they dug into the banks of the channels.
I got four steel traps in the mail and two stretchers. The traps had two jaws with a long narrow 'U' shaped tongue acted as a spring off one end, that when depressed allowed the jaws to open and you set the trigger in the center. When the trigger was depressed the tension in the tongue snapped the jaws shut.
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