The most elusive . . . and shyest thing in the woods.
—ERNEST THOMPSON SETON,
Wild Animals at Home
The arrival of European settlers heralded a dramatic change in attitude toward cougars. While Natives revered and feared the big cats, newcomers to the land were divided in their views. Some saw the animals as cunning murderers and dastardly varmints best shot on sight; others considered them great hunters of their natural prey but cowardly when it came to confrontations with humans.
While travelling in North America during the late 1850s, Sir James Carnegie, the Ninth Earl of Southesk, made an observation about the stealth of the cougar that revealed sentiments common to the day: “Making out a small party of hunters or travelers, it will follow them for days, and watch their camp at night, till at last it discovers one of their number resting a little separate from his companions. Then, when all is dark and silent, the insidious puma glides in and the sleeper knows but a short awakening before its fangs are buried in his throat.” Grief-stricken by the loss of his wife, the thirty-two-year-old had left Scotland to “travel in some part of the world where good sport could be met with among the larger animals” and in hopes of restoring his health. North American holidays that combined wilderness adventure and possibly restorative health benefits became popular with the British and North American upper class during the nineteenth century. For those who could afford it, these trips were a way to escape the tedium and trials of everyday life, prove one’s manhood by experiencing potentially dangerous situations and collect entertaining stories to tell at dinner parties for years to come.
Carnegie’s concerns about cougars were justified, as they do stalk their prey for long distances, sometimes for hours or even the better part of a day. And there are documented cases of the cats attacking people while sleeping and attempting to break into tents. But not everyone shared his unease. In Wild Animals at Home, Ernest Thompson Seton referred to the mountain lion as “the most elusive, sneaking, adroit hider and shyest thing in the woods.” The wildlife artist, naturalist and author was a founding member of the Boy Scouts of America and was appointed Official Naturalist to the Government of Manitoba in 1892. A tall, rangy fellow with bushy hair and a signature mustache, Seton often disappeared into the backcountry for weeks at a time. He once noted that in twenty-five years of camping he’d never seen a cougar in the wild but was certain many had seen him.
In the chapter entitled “Sneak-cats Big and Small” he recalled a September 1899 trip with his wife in the High Sierras of California. Since the weather was fine they arranged their bedding on the ground. The next morning the horses were gone and the tracks of a large cougar were everywhere. “He had prowled into camp coming up to where we slept, sneaked around and smelt us over and—I think—walked down the alley between our beds,” wrote Seton. “The horses were in danger but I think we were not.”
As a naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton enjoyed spending time outdoors conducting research for his wildlife paintings and books. He drew this sketch after an 1899 camping trip with his wife in the High Sierras of California. The couple never heard a sound but woke up one morning to find their horses gone and the paw prints of a mountain lion circling their bedding. Sketch by Ernest Thompson Seton in Wild Animals at Home, 1913
Former US president and avid big game hunter Theodore Roosevelt shared Seton’s lack of concern, and considered cougars the most cowardly of the big cats around humans. In 1916 he observed that although large male cougars often killed prey that an African leopard would hesitate to tackle, they rarely threatened people. “There is no more need of being frightened when sleeping in, or wandering after nightfall through, a forest infested by cougars than if they were so many tom-cats,” he wrote in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open. “It is absolutely safe to walk up to within ten yards of a cougar at bay, whether wounded or unwounded, and to shoot it at leisure.”
Whether cougars were considered killers or cowards was a matter of perception. While various nature lovers and big game hunters felt there was nothing to fear, many explorers and immigrants assumed cougars were related to the lions, tigers and leopards found in Africa and Asia. At different times each of those animals has borne the name “man-eater.” So why wouldn’t the big cats of the New World possess the same appetites and inclinations?
One of the earliest recorded instances of a cougar attacking a human took place in 1751. Philip Tanner was killed at the edge of the woods at Betty’s Patch—now known as Lewisville—in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The fifty-eight-year-old owned a mill and lived nearby. It’s believed he was scouting the area for timber to harvest when he died. A crouching cougar is chiselled on his tombstone.
In Two Admirals: Sir Fairfax Moresby & John Moresby, A Record of a Hundred Years, John Moresby recounted an 1853 incident at Fort Rupert on northern Vancouver Island. “Bear, deer and puma abound, the latter much dreaded and with reason,” wrote the British naval officer, who was serving on the HMS Thetis at the time. “During our stay, whilst the women were gathering roots in the forest, one puma killed twelve girls, tearing them down one after another like a dog worrying sheep. We would gladly have avenged them, and the Indians were willing guides, but we had no luck in the impenetrable woods.”
Many New World settlers considered cougars bloodthirsty killers that posed a serious threat to livestock and human life, so shot them on sight.
Events like these provoked fear and anger, prompting people to shoot cougars anytime they saw one. But there was another problem: many immigrants had no desire to live in the wilderness; they wanted to shape it to their wants and needs. So they sculpted the landscape into farms, ranches and communities, clearing ground, planting crops, raising livestock and building towns as fast and as soon as they could. The prevailing attitude of the day was that the land, and all that was in and on it, was theirs to exploit as they saw fit. Trees were for firewood, fences and buildings while fertile soil was for planting vegetables, fruit trees and grains, and for raising chickens, cattle and sheep. Deer, buffalo, grouse and other indigenous wildlife were there to stock the pantry.
Large predators, such as wolves, bears and pumas, were another matter. They were also eaten but not as often. Wolf meat tended to be stringy and tough and was often regarded as unsuitable for consumption unless a person was starving. According to an 1868 article in The Saint Pauls Magazine, edited by Anthony Trollope, “The flesh of the wolf may be taken to be about the rankest of carrion in creation, not even excepting the common vulture and turkey buzzard.”
Of the three, bear meat was, and still is, the most commonly consumed. Sweet and on the greasy side, it’s said to taste similar to pork. Two-year-old cubs were considered prime, especially if killed in the spring while they were still eating roots and berries and before they had an opportunity to feast on rotting, spawning salmon. As for cougar meat, it wasn’t eaten on a regular basis but those who tried it generally liked it, with some even considering it a delicacy. Those who have tried cougar meat say it resembles veal or lamb in flavour, taste and texture but can be dry as the fat content is low. Charles Darwin, who ate cougar while exploring South America, noted, “The flesh is very white and remarkably like veal.”
Even today, cougar meat is deemed a tasty addition to a cook’s repertoire by some. While living in Hagensborg, a small community in the Bella Coola Valley on the central coast of BC, Kristeva Dowling learned that although cougar lard is rare, it makes excellent pastry. “The very best way to cook cougar, however,” she said, “is to stir-fry it with snow peas and water chestnuts. Or make a real smoked ham with the hind end.”
Early settlers, like modern day ranchers, were more concerned with cougars preying on livestock than as potential entrees for the dinner table. And as settlement spread, conflicts were inevitable. By the mid-1800s large tracts of old-growth forest—some say more than fifty percent of what existed in the eastern United States—had been transformed into agricultural land. The same changes were taking place in Canada, just at a slower, less dramatic pace. The loss of habitat, accompanied by unrestricted hunting, resulted in a dramatic decrease in the deer population, and deer are a staple of many cougars’ diets. So when deer were replaced with cattle, sheep, pigs, horses and domestic pets, the ever-adaptable cougar began hunting a different kind of prey.
South of the US the story was much the same. In northern Mexico, Jesuit missionary Joseph Oct wrote of flocks of thousands of sheep and goats in his mid-1700s diary, but noted, “The numbers of these animals would be even more remarkable were not about half of them devoured by tigers or leopards.” Depredation of livestock by pumas became a serious problem in the Patagonia region of Argentina when newcomers created large sheep ranches and also heavily hunted guanacos, the llama-like animals that were the major prey for pumas in the area. Early records of this region also document many attacks by the big cats on horses and humans.
Depending on the season and various conditions, such as if a female is pregnant, nursing or feeding young, a cougar typically kills and eats the equivalent of one deer every seven to ten days. On occasion, however, a cougar has killed as many as fifty sheep and only fed off two or three. Perhaps domestic animals aren’t as quick to vacate the scene of a slaughter as wild beasts, or if they’re penned up are unable to do so, thus creating a slaying opportunity too good for a cougar to pass up. Or as Harley Shaw speculated in Soul Among Lions, the panicked behaviour of livestock may put a cougar’s chase and kill instinct into overdrive. Whatever the case, it’s easy to see how the cats became known as “bloodthirsty beasts” and “ravenous brutes.”
For early settlers it was a struggle to tame and control the land in order to survive. When problems arose, they usually had to deal with situations on their own. Since cougars attacked livestock, pets and sometimes people, they were seen as a threat to both livelihood and life. Nearly all settlers possessed firearms and most didn’t hesitate to use them. And on occasion they employed more organized efforts to destroy predators. In The Panther and the Wolf, Colonel Henry W. Shoemaker described a 1760 game drive led by Black Jack Swartz in Snyder County, Pennsylvania. Two hundred men accompanied by barking dogs formed a circle roughly 48 kilometres (30 miles) in diameter and then closed in while shouting, shooting guns and blowing whistles. On that particular day they killed 41 cougars, 109 wolves, 112 foxes, 114 mountain cats (lynx and bobcats), 17 black bears, 12 wolverines, 3 fishers, an otter and a grizzly bear.
As the natural habitat disappeared, so did the wildlife. The animals that remained were ruthlessly slain—some for food, others for sport. The population of white-tailed deer dropped so dramatically that they were classed as uncommon in Connecticut by 1700. And as their primary prey vanished, the number of cougars dwindled. By the mid- to late 1800s it was believed that all cougars in the US had been exterminated east of the Mississippi River except for a small population in Florida. In Canada, it was estimated that there were as few as forty cougars left in Ontario by the 1800s.
As people moved west, they faced the same conflicts with predators. Even in the early days of settlement, Vancouver Island had a reputation for a high density of cougars. And they seemed particularly fond of settlers’ livestock. Eric Duncan moved from the Shetland Islands to central Vancouver Island in 1877. In his memoir Fifty-Seven Years in the Comox Valley, he wrote: “One day my aunt (a tiny woman), hoeing potatoes in a field, was puzzled by the persistent squealing of a small pig in the bush alongside. Climbing the fence, she went towards the sound, and saw a cougar sitting on his haunches, holding up the pig in his mouth like a squirrel with a fir cone. She advanced, waving her hoe and calling out, as she would have done to a fence-breaking cow, and the surprised brute dropped his prey and slunk off. The pig, though badly mauled, survived.”
Of course, those with larger herds of livestock couldn’t be on constant guard with a stout stick and sharp tone of voice. Instead, they formed range and livestock associations and lobbied governments to initiate predator control programs. Folks back east had resolved their predator problem and people in the west were determined to do the same. And so the biggest cat in Canada and the US went from being a feared but always respected and often worshiped symbol of authority and power to a nasty piece of work to be exterminated at any cost.