In spring 1910, one of the big stories was the poor fur harvest that winter. Though the cause was unknown, most folks pointed to one big factor: the use of poison by some trappers. This article from the April 28, 1910 News-Miner explains:

RECKLESS POISONING OF FUR-BEARING ANIMALS

Promiscuous Distribution of Poison Has Devastated the Entire Country—Trappers Come in Empty-Handed—Not a Track in Great Districts That Formerly Swarmed With Fur-Bearing Denizens.

It is more than depressing to see the trappers come in empty handed this spring. It is sufficient to cause an outburst of righteous indignation from any fair-minded person, when it is realized that the state of affairs is due to a promiscuous slaughtering of the fur bearing animals through poison by persons too lazy or unskilled to trap them, whose vandalism has desolated the entire country.

When poison is put out for a fox or other animal it usually happens that only about one out of five that eat the bait die where the poisoner finds them. The others wander off and die, and being eaten by other denizens of the woods in turn spread death to another circle. This is plainly evident when the scarcity of ravens is noted; these black scavengers having been almost entirely clean out of the country.

Trappers that two years ago came in with 100 lynx skins, this season have perhaps one or two. One man in fact who had spent the winter on the Kantishna did not have a skin to his credit. Estimates on the returns from the traps are to the effect that there is not one-tenth of 1 percent of the lynx available this spring that were taken two years ago.

So far but two silver fox skins have come into town; these from the McKinley district, and where in previous years hundred of foxes wrote their records on the snow, not a track was to be seen this last winter, the work of the poisoner having been of sweeping effectiveness.

The head of the Nenana and the Little Delta were heretofore the best fox trapping districts, but both are now blanks.