This post is part of a series about the “Mutual Interests: Collaboration Across the Arts and Humanities” exhibition developed by faculty in the Society, Technology, and Environment Cluster at Grand Valley State University.

Geronimo was a mature male beaver who became a test subject for the Idaho Fish and Game Department in summer 1948. McCall, a rapidly-growing resort town on the west-central side of the state, was overrun with invasive beavers. Although beavers (Castor canadensis) are indigenous to Idaho and have long shaped both Indigenous and settler life in the region, they were a nuisance in a postwar town, damaging agricultural plantings and irrigation infrastructure.¹ Elmo “Scotty” Heter, a Fish and Game Conservation Officer based in McCall, planned to relocate the beavers east to what is now called the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, a mountainous region with little road access. However, the extant transportation methods, such as carrying the animals on horseback, were unacceptable; beavers require constant watering and horses carrying “a struggling, odorous pair of live beavers” were easily spooked.² Instead, Heter sought to transplant beavers by air. He designed an inexpensive proprietary wooden box held in tension by sling ropes and a thick rubber band attached to a parachute. The crate could be dropped from an airplane. Once it hit the ground, the ropes would slacken and the beavers–typically two to a box–could be freed without human intervention.³ 

Heter and his team initially experimented with dummy weights, but eventually Geronimo was recruited for multiple test descents. The “patient and long-suffering beaver” even learned to return to the crate upon release.⁴ His ultimate reward was a final one-way flight on a Travelair 6000 operated by the McCall branch of the Johnson Flying Service, a Montana-based airline that frequently took on federal and state forestry contracts.⁵ Geronimo and 75 other beavers were dropped into the Chamberlain Basin from an altitude of 500-600 feet through October, the Travelair circling briefly to confirm that they had successfully landed. Heter returned on foot weeks later to retrieve the parachutes for re-use and check on the beavers, nearly all of whom survived and had already built new dams.⁶

North American beaver populations had dwindled through the nineteenth century due to over-hunting and other anthropogenic interventions. By the 1920s, ecological scientists began to recognize their value as “ecosystem engineers” and attempted a variety of reintroduction schemes.⁷ However, Heter’s was spectacular in the literal sense. Aviation had always been a technological system closely tied to wonder, spectacle, and awe. The ability to transcend the laws of physics, shrink space, and access challenging environments made civilian aviation a source of fascination for everyday people, while the tremendous destructive power of aircraft in the first and especially the second World Wars had revealed the frightening implications of technologically taming the skies.⁸ In national and regional contexts with “undeveloped” hinterlands such as the Canadian North, Siberia, and the Brazilian rainforest, aviation served as a tool of nation-building, allowing state access to impenetrable environments and the Indigenous people therein.⁹ The Western and Midwestern parts of the United States were made legible by air as well. As Jason Weems points out, aerial surveying and mapping for forestry, agriculture, and other resource management purposes was an extension of the 18th century Land Ordinance systems that turned the west into an ordered grid, what he calls “managerial mosaics” that generated authority about environments from above.¹⁰

As Geronimo and his more-than-human companions were being loaded into boxes to be carried on pre-war single-engine monoplanes, they were becoming part of this system of vertical visions. Operating on behalf of the state government, Heter was re-shaping the environment from above, moving “ecosystem engineers” across the state to their new home. However, our installation reckons with the limits of this anthropocentric aerial view. Flight was an entirely new sensorial experience for Geronimo, as it was for many North American humans at this time, but unlike his human kin, Geronimo had no real frame of reference for his relocation and we will never know what he saw, heard, smelled, and felt as he floated hundreds of feet above his new home.

Our collaboration is not an attempt to recreate the beaver’s aerial descent, but rather to remind ourselves that such recreations can only be speculative. We have purposefully chosen to recreate a relocation crate as closely as possible to Heter’s published specifications while obfuscating many other elements. Publicly-available 1940s aerial survey images of central Idaho have been composited and layered, further fragmenting the gridded frames of centralized aerial photography. Sections of crates are scattered as if in mid-air, the air-holes drilled across their sides flickering light, shadow and texture as Travelair engines punctuate the sounds of a wilderness typically far distant from human considerations. 

As a historian specializing in aviation and a multimedia artist interested in the animal experience, we developed A Beaver’s Vertical Visions to reimagine the drop using both primary source research and speculative artistic reframing. Bringing together the physical and visual markers of the event such as the reconstructed box, the parachute placed on the floor as if it had just landed, and aerial photographs on the wall as well as fragments of the reconstructed box, the installation dislodges these elements from their original functions and spectacular framing. In particular, the air holes drilled into the crate—which are also one of the visual focal points of the installation—become visual markers of a possible animal gaze, suggesting fragmented glimpses of the sky from within the box. While the crate sits on the floor as if it has just landed, it can be observed as an object from the outside. Fragments of the crate are installed on the wall as a video installation, evoking views from within its interior. Together, these two elements create a shift in scale and a double position: viewers can observe the crate as an object while also imagining themselves inside it, experiencing the partial views possibly available to the animal. The viewers’ experience of dislocation echoes Geronimo’s own, as he was also subjected to this forced vertical perspective.

The novelty of packaging beavers into boxes, dropping them from an airplane, and leaving them to their own devices in the wilderness captured the contemporary imagination, and when video footage of the “beaver drop” was found by the Idaho Fish and Game’s archivist and uploaded to the web in 2015, Geronimo became popular again. Called “Fur for the Future,” the 14-minute educational video (c. 1950) developed by the Idaho Fish and Game department starts with a claim that “fur is important.” The fur trade is assigned significant historical agency–the fur trapper moved through the region before the farmer, logger, or other forms of settlement. Muskrat, marten, and beaver are all profiled in this video and the parachuting is only briefly shown, but the description the Idaho Fish and Game Department included when they posted it to YouTube in 2015 starts with “Parachuting beavers!”

Beavers are an especially charismatic animal in many North American contexts, which certainly contributes to the enduring popularity of Heter’s scheme, and we cannot discount the Internet’s enthusiasm for videos of animals in unexpected situations. Still, our artwork seeks to offer a glimpse into the animal experience by foregrounding Geronimo and questioning how animals are framed through spectacle and the tendency to position them as props for human endeavours.

Rather than presenting the beaver solely as a charismatic figure, a test animal, or an ecosystem engineer—all roles Geronimo and his companions played in this event — the installation proposes a counter-anthropocentric approach to the “beaver drop” that respectfully attends to the animals without presuming to fully know their experience. While the crate and the parachute evoke the forced verticality of their relocation, the installation reframes these objects, estranging them from their original context to shift attention away from the spectacle of the drop and toward the animals as subjects on their own right.

1. Kevin R. Marsh, “Crossing Divides: An Environmental History of Idaho” in Idaho’s Place: A New History of the Gem State (University of Washington Press, 2014), 45-49. See also Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (University of Washington Press, 1999). ↩︎
2. Elmo Heter, “Transplanting Beavers by Airplane and Parachute,” Journal of Wildlife Management 14:2 (April 1950): 144; “Beaver Dropped from Sky to New Homes,” Idaho Wildlife Review (October, 1948), 5 ↩︎
3. Elmo Heter, “Transplanting Beavers by Airplane and Parachute,” Journal of Wildlife Management 14:2 (April 1950): 144; “Beaver Dropped from Sky to New Homes,” Idaho Wildlife Review (October, 1948), 5 ↩︎
4. Paul Corey, “Beaver Airlift,” Argosy (June 1954), 83. ↩︎
5. Jim Larkin, et. al. Aviation History of the Central Idaho Wilderness, Heritage Program, Payette National Forest, US Forest Service, 2003. University of Idaho Digital Collections https://objects.lib.uidaho.edu/taylorarchive/b08-PayetteNationalForestLiterature54.pdf ; Frank Wiley, Montana and the Sky (Montana Aeronautics Commission, 1966), 178-181. ↩︎
6. Idaho Fish and Game Department, Wildlife Restoration Division Quarterly Report, July-October 1948, 
   Idaho Fish and Game Department. ↩︎
7. See, for example, Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (UBC Press, 2006), 63-120 and Steven M. Fountain, “Ranchers’ Friend and Farmers’ Foe: Reshaping Nature With Beaver Introduction in California,” Environmental History 19 (April 2014): 239-269. Clive Jones et. al. “Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers,” Oikos 69:3 (1994), 373-386. ↩︎
8. For example, see Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908-1918 (Yale University Press, 1994) and The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1920-1950 (Yale University Press, 2005). ↩︎
9. Liza Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada (UBC Press, 2010); Felipe Fernandes Cruz, “Napalm Colonization: Native Peoples in Brazil’s Aeronautical Frontiers,” Hispanic American Historical Review 101:3 (2021): 461-489; Scott Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge, 2006). ↩︎
10. Jason Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 45-125. ↩︎

Feature Image: detail from “1948 Aerial Photography Index for the National Forest Service DGQ Project Area Sheet 8,” National Archives, NAID 200943591.

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Blair Stein and Marianne Hoffmeister Castro

Marianne Hoffmeister Castro is a multidisciplinary artist and Assistant Professor of Studio Foundations and Visual Studies at Grand Valley State University. Her research critically examines the representation of nature and nonhuman animals in the contemporary western world. She works with drawing, film/video, artist’s books, experimental writing, and research-based methodologies to bring attention to how nonhuman beings are depicted in visual culture and the complex relationships we establish with them across diverse cultural domains. She lives and works between Chile and the US. Blair Stein is an Assistant Professor in the History department at Grand Valley State University. She is a historian of science and technology with a special focus on aviation and environment. Her first book, an "envirotechnical" history of Trans-Canada Air Lines, is forthcoming with McGill-Queen's University Press. She is currently the co-Editor-in-Chief of The Otter.

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• Shared Vertical Visions and the 1948 Idaho “Beaver Drop” - November 6, 2026