WHEN I WAS IN college it was my habit to go down to West Virginia and stay with a man who, among other things, ran sheep to make ends meet. He and his wife were both in their eighties, living on an income of about twenty-five hundred dollars a year, almost all of that from the sale of mutton and wool. One winter night—I was sleeping on the second floor—I was suddenly awakened by shouts from the sheep pen. I sprang from under the down covers and ran across the bare, freezing floor to the window. The man’s oldest son was out there in the snow in his underwear with a .30/30, trying to get a shot at a black bear in the sheep pens. The bear killed eleven sheep. And disappeared into the darkness. I never forgot that. The man standing there in the snow with his gun, looking at the dead sheep.
On a summer afternoon recently I sat in the shade of cottonwood trees near a trickling creek on the edge of a playa desert in southeastern Oregon, talking with an old man who had hunted wolves when he was young. He was working a cinnabar claim here now, for mercury. His nearest neighbors were a few miles away. He had no electricity in his one-room shack, no phone, no running water. But he got on from one year to the next. He was a frontier jack-of-all-trades, who’d herded cattle, been a commercial fisherman in Alaska, trapped in the Coast Range, and worked Montana oilfields. When he was nineteen he hunted wolves with a pack of dogs in the Dakotas and eastern Montana. As he spoke, he explained how he controlled the half-wild dogs and what happened when they met a wolf and how the wolves were finally killed out of that country by the late twenties.
He would turn the wolves in for an eight-dollar bounty. If the pelt was good and it was a good year, he got another fifteen or twenty dollars in trade.
“God, that was terrible big money,” Dave Wallace said that afternoon. Without the ranchers’ help, he told me, without meals and grain feed for his horses, he never would have made it. “It was awful work. God, the dogs, you didn’t want to turn your back on them. They’d try to kill you.”
When the dogs jumped a wolf, he would worry about how many dogs he was going to lose. “A wolf can’t run as fast as a coyote, so he’d get in a low place like a coulee and wait for the dogs chasing him to come over the top. The first time I saw it, the wolf grabbed the first dog behind the shoulder and tore out a rib and the second one he got back of the head and crushed it. Just crushed it. Then the rest of them came in on him and I ran over the top of all of them on the horse and clubbed the wolf to death.”
Wallace left Montana when he still was nineteen. He told me he never liked dogs much after that. But he did. As is the way, oddly, with such men, he was quite fond of animals, and he imagined himself, in his later years, something like them. Lonely. Looked down on.
Dave Wallace died a few months after I spoke with him. One afternoon in the spring he had a heart attack while he was driving his pickup down the road. It drifted off into the sagebrush and coasted to a stop in some cheat grass. From where the truck came to rest, out the windshield, you could see most of a thirty-thousand-acre cattle ranch. It was in the interest of that industry, ironically, that Wallace had killed fifty-nine wolves for bounty.
One evening before he died, Wallace told me how cold it would get in the Dakotas in the winter, and that he would bundle himself up in wolf furs to keep warm at forty and fifty below. “A wolf will live through that kind of cold, walk around in it. Jesus they’re a tough animal.” We talked about dying and I told him that as part of an Aztec ritual of last rites a man’s breast was pricked with the sharpened bone of a wolf. Wallace looked across the room at me and said nothing. It was as though he understood exactly the kind of meaning this had, the sort of encouragement it was to a dying man. Uneducated, alone in a shack in the desert, dying of old age, Wallace smiled for a moment, as serene in his comprehension of the mystery of life as Buddha.
No other wolf killing ever achieved either in geographic scope or economic or emotional scale the predator-control war waged against wolves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States and Canada, on the tail end of which Dave Wallace found himself. Eric Zimen, a German wolf biologist, once remarked that he was utterly unable to fathom the relentless carnage. “We killed the wolf in Europe,” he said, “and we hated the wolf, but it was not anything like what you have done in America.” Even speaking as a prejudiced European he was correct.
The immigrant newly arrived in North America in the seventeenth century faced certain hardship. Starting almost literally from scratch he had to clear timber, build a home, secure food, and deal with a host of adverse conditions, many of which were dangerous and some of which he had never heard of, like poison ivy and rattlesnakes. In addition he had to effect some sort of understanding with native Americans, a people whose language he did not speak, whose customs he did not understand, and whose power was mysterious. The Indians came and went like fog; they survived well in an environment that seemed to him intractable. They were like the wolves who came at night and snatched a pig, a small enough thing in itself but not to a man who had brought the pig thousands of miles to a place where there were no domestic pigs. The Indian came in the middle of the night and took an ax and disappeared. Wolves and Indians stared at him from the edge of his fields for hours and made him uneasy; he wrote that the wolves were not as ferocious as European wolves but were more numerous. In the colonist’s mind Indian and wolf often fused into a symbol of the land’s hostility, of the dangers that lay ahead. In more sober moments he recognized that both Indian and wolf were simply curious; but he did not deal well at all with curiosity. He built walls around his villages to keep wolves and Indians out. He began to shoot wolves and Indians. He wrote in his bounty ordinances of “wolf scalps,” and said of Indians that they attacked his villages “like a pack of wolves.” A Massachusetts law of 1638 stated, “Whoever shall [within the town] shoot off a gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except an Indian or a wolf, shall forfeit 5 shillings for every shot.”
Newly arrived Protestant ministers drew parallels between the savage paganism of the Indian and the wolf. Both, they preached, tried the souls of men with their depredations, and the ministers urged colonists to give in to neither. They didn’t. By the end of the nineteenth century the primary food resources of Indian and wolf were gone—both had been deliberately poisoned—and both had been reduced to living on reservations. Insofar as the Indian became a Christian and lived like a white man he was accepted; insofar as the wolf became a dog, a pet, or a draft animal in someone’s sledge harness he, too, was accepted. But by 1900 there wasn’t much point in being either a wolf or an Indian in the United States.
The colonist had no experience in dealing with Indians and knew little more about killing wolves. But since the two seemed so alike, he fell to dealing with them in similar ways. He set out poisoned meat for the wolf and gave the Indian blankets infected with smallpox. He raided the wolf’s den to dig out and destroy the pups, and stole the Indian’s children and sent them to missionary schools to be rehabilitated. When he was accused of butchery for killing wolves and Indians, he spun tales of Mohawk cruelty and of wolves who ate fawns while they were still alive, invoking the ancient law of literal equivalents. By the late nineteenth century the argot of the Indian wars was the argot of the wolf wars. General Sheridan said: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” and the wolfer said, “The only good wolf is a dead one.” Indians and wolves who later came into areas where there were no more of either were called renegades. Wolves that lay around among the buffalo herds were called loafer wolves and Indians that hung around the forts were called loafer Indians.
In the aftermath of this persecution, America came to beat its breast over the murder of Indians. But most people never knew, and few cared, what had happened to wolves. Insofar as both were exterminated for similar reasons, that is interesting. Insofar as the wolf, unlike the whooping crane and the buffalo we almost killed out, led a life similar to our own, it is odd that no one ever asked why.
The European colonist was not much troubled by wolves until he began raising stock. The first livestock came to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1609—swine, cattle, and horses. By 1625 these animals were common in colonial settlements and how to stop the wolves who preyed on these beasts was a topic to galvanize community discussion. While the European farmer might have dealt with predation by himself, in America, where people were forced to band together for a variety of reasons, wolf control was a community problem. Together with his neighbors a man dug wolf pits and erected palisades. He conducted battues and paid salaries of professional wolf hunters, as he had done in Europe. And he passed bounty laws. Wolf bounties had been a means of effecting wolf control for thousands of years and were current in Europe and the British Isles at the time of immigration. A system both biologically ineffective and wide open to fraud, it was nevertheless popular because raising the bounty payment and exchanging it for a dead wolf was tangible, daily evidence that something was being done.
The first wolf bounty law in America was passed in Massachusetts on November 9, 1630. Further bounty laws were soon passed in Virginia at Jamestown (on September 4, 1632) and in the other colonies. Payments were made in cash, tobacco, wine, corn, and, for Indians, blankets and trinkets. A New Jersey law of 1697 states: “Whatsoever Christian shall kill and bring the head of a wolf … to any magistrate … shall be paid a bounty of twenty shillings… .” Only half that much was to be paid to Indians and blacks who killed wolves; it also became the custom to require Indians to produce without compensation one or two wolf pelts a year. A Virginia law passed in 1668 broke down the requirement of tribute in wolves to be paid according to the number of hunters in each tribe, asking 725 hunters to produce 145 wolves annually. (A hundred and fifty years later at Fort Union, Montana, trading companies were buying wolf pelts they didn’t need in order “not to create any dissatisfaction” among the Indians.)
In 1717 residents on Cape Cod tried to build a six-foot-high, eight-mile-long fence across the peninsula between Plymouth and Barnstable counties to keep the wolves from knocking off an occasional cow, but the project proved too expensive. Someone else discovered spring-loaded tallow balls. A steel fishhook was rolled back on itself like a spring, bound with thread, and covered with tallow. The balls were scattered around a wolf kill and the wolves who ate them died of internal hemorrhaging. Iron shipments from England and the production of local bog iron resulted in a variety of traps being produced, but they were too heavy and unwieldy to be popular. Some towns bought their own wolfhounds and appointed a hound master. (The huge Irish wolfhounds, 36 inches at the shoulder and weighing 120 pounds, were hard to come by. Oliver Cromwell in 1652 had issued an order that the popular dogs were not to be exported as they were too much needed in Ireland.)
By the first part of the eighteenth century the colonies were striving for self-sufficiency and the need for a sheep industry was clear. One of those concerned with wool production was Gen. George Washington. In a series of letters he exchanged with Arthur Young, president of the Agricultural Society of Great Britain, with Thomas Jefferson, and with Richard Peters, of the Philadelphia Agricultural Society, Washington lamented the attacks of feral dogs and wolves, which “retarded the growth of the sheep industry.” Young couldn’t understand why, since there were wolves in Europe and sheep raising flourished there. It was one of the last times America went to England for advice.
Two points had eluded Young: first, that there were a lot more wolves and wild dogs in America; and second, that the tendency in the States
In the 1920s the Ross Island Meat Packing Company of North Dakota paid a little-publicized bounty of eight dollars on German shepherds, a popular breed of dog in the northern plains at the time and often responsible for killing cattle, the slaughter of which was invariably blamed on wolves.
was not, as it was in Europe, to subdivide more or less settled land but to expand into decidedly unsettled land. Under those conditions more than a couple of shepherds and a hedgerow were required to guarantee a sheep industry.
The extent of predation on sheep by feral dogs that the Washington-Young correspondence alludes to has largely been ignored by historians of the period, who were content, as were the colonists, to ascribe all canine predation to the wolf. Since the wolf, not the dog, wore the cloak of evil and few could tell the difference between their tracks, wolves were blamed for the death of any animal if a canine print was close by. If a sheep died of natural causes—and sheep diseases were another thing that worried Washington—and its carcass was scavenged by dogs, it was often reported as a wolf kill. This error was far from innocuous. Long after the wolf ceased to be important as a predator on New England livestock, he was still bountied and blamed for predation caused by feral dogs.
Compounding the issue was the indiscriminate killing of wolves when only one or two were actually doing the damage in a region where twenty or thirty lived.
Under such continued pressure and harassment, the wolf had begun to disappear in the Northeast before the end of the eighteenth century. What few wolves were left lived in remote areas and avoided men. Some may have emigrated over the Alleghenies like the Indians, ahead of westward expansion.
The New England experience with the wolf was repeated as settlers moved west through the eastern hardwood forests of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. Bounties were enacted, wolf drives took place, pits were dug, poison and traps were set out. To the north in Michigan and Wisconsin and to the south in Tennessee and Missouri the wolf held out longer. By the time the settlers reached the edge of the Great Plains, they could turn and see behind them a virtually wolfless track, hundreds of miles wide, that stretched all the way back to the Atlantic seaboard.
“Moonlight, Wolf” by Frederic Remington.
The prairie expanse of rich grasslands they now faced was a different kind of wilderness for the settlers. De Smet had called it a desert, but farmers whose fathers and grandfathers had cleared the rocky soil of New England and the pine forests of Virginia looked with disbelief at the square miles of open space, dotted here and there with oak groves, and at the richness of the black soil.
The wolf hunted the buffalo herds out here. (Meriwether Lewis had referred to him in his journal as “the shepherd of the buffalo.”) The compulsive attitude of extirpation toward the wolf (but not the fear) eased for a while at the edge of the Great Plains as the pioneers emerged from the dark forests.
Canis lupus nubilus, the Great Plains wolf, was as different from the Eastern timber wolf, perhaps, as woodland Indians like the Delaware were from buffalo Indians like the Sioux, but like the Sioux, he soon came to stand for all his kind. He showed up frequently in the writings of early explorers and pioneers, in ways both good and bad. The greatest attention was paid to the wolf’s howl and then to imaginings about his nature. What to us may seem visions bordering on fantasy were recorded. The German explorer Maximilian of Wied, for example, writes of great white wolves drifting over distant hills one evening with the fireball of the sun setting behind them. Maximilian was unusual in that like many foreign visitors he found the wolf’s howl pleasing and he was “long amused” by the gambols of wolves on the open prairie. He wrote of wolves sitting at the edge of the firelight, “gazing at us without appearing to be at all afraid.”
Out West most people were unnerved by wolves staring at them, and shot at them. A more typical description of the wolf’s howl was this one by James Capen Adams, a self-styled mountaineer and grizzly bear hunter from California: “It is indeed a horrible noise, the most hateful a man alone in the wilderness at night can hear. To a person anywise low-spirited, it suggests the most awful fancies, and it is altogether doleful in the extreme … the lugubrious howl of a pack of wolves is more than I like; and I was glad to put the cowardly rascals to flight by sending a ball after them.”
As for prairie visions of the wolf, few had Maximilian’s appreciation. More common was this buffalo hunter’s description of the wolves: “Each [was] the very incarnation of destruction, with his powerful jaws of shark teeth … and the cunning of man.”
After its howl—it is arresting how often the wolf’s voice is mentioned, as though it were a bell tolling, reminding the traveler of his loneliness in the new land, that he didn’t fit, of Indians, that he was vulnerable—after its howl and stare, it was the wolf’s cowardly nature that was most often mentioned. Wrote one traveler: “Large, gaunt, and fierce as it looks, it is one of the greatest cowards known, even when assembled in numbers, and seldom has the courage to face even a boy… . I have actually kicked them and pelted them with stones and dried buffalo chips, but I never knew them to display any more dangerous characteristics than to howl fearfully, or grin with pain as they trotted away.”
Francis Parkman told prospective pioneers in The Oregon Trail, “There is not the slightest danger from them, for they are the greatest cowards of the prairie.”
The wolf’s having learned to be wary of the reach of guns led some people to charge that he was a coward. Others confused being shy with being timid. In view of the war to come, these words of Col. Richard Dodge’s, written in 1878, are strange: “All these wolves are exceedingly cowardly, one alone not possessing courage enough even to attack a sheep. When in packs and exceedingly hungry they have been known to muster up resolution enough to attack an ox or cow if the latter be entirely alone.” Ten years later cattlemen would throw such writing in the fireplace. Dodge, by the way, went on to say that the wolf “of all the carnivorous animals of equal size and strength, [is] the most harmless to beast and least dangerous to man.”
Dodge, like Maximilian, was the exception. A Canadian hunter named Billings wrote in 1856 that the wolf “is a cruel, savage, cowardly animal, with such a disposition that he will kill a whole flock of sheep merely for the sake of gratifying his thirst for blood, when one or two would have been sufficient for his wants. I have found them the most cowardly of animals—when caught in a trap or wounded by a gun, or when cornered up so they could not escape, I invariably killed them with a club or tomahawk, and I never met with any resistance. It is true I have seen them show some boldness if a number of them had run down a deer when I attempted to drive them away, yet have always seen them give way if a shot was fired amongst them.”
In Pattie’s Personal Narrative, 1824–30, what I take for a common exaggeration of the times shows up. James O. Pattie tells of breaking up a wolf pack along the Santa Fe Trail. “We judged there were at least a thousand. They were large and white as sheep.” Of all the likely tall tales of wolf attack at the time, one of the best is C. W. Webber’s account in Romance of Sporting; or, Wild Scenes and Wild Hunters, in which Capt. Dan Henrie of the Texas Rangers is attacked by a pack of wolves. They eat his horse out from under him as he scrambles into a tree, where he holds them off with rifle fire. In a bloody frenzy the wolves tear each other apart and chew the stock off Henrie’s rifle when it falls among them before they realize what it is. Just when all seems lost, a lone buffalo attracts the wolves’ attention and off they go. Captain Henrie climbs out of the tree, builds a fire, and begins roasting wolf flesh to regain his strength.
They tell a story about Jim Bridger, the mountain man, who was setting beavertraps along a creek in the Bitterroot Mountains in 1829 when he was jumped by wolves. Bridger ran for the nearest tree and was able to climb out of reach before the wolves could get to him. After milling around for a while, all the wolves but one, who was left behind to guard, departed. A half hour later the wolves returned with a beaver whom they set to chewing the tree down.
As one might guess from these stories, the relating of such scenes lent an aura of importance to the lives of those involved. For that reason the storyteller did not often hew the mark of truth.
The wolves of the plains were, of course, whatever one wanted to make of them. Thus the howling wolf was the Pawnee’s spirit talker, the missionary’s banshee, Maximilian’s music, and the lone traveler’s sleepless nightmare.
The first people to express any interest in killing wolves on the plains were trappers, who came into the West on the heels of the Lewis and Clark expedition, looking for beaver. They incidentally killed wolves that raided their food caches and trap lines, and when the beaver were trapped out in the 1850s they began killing wolves specifically for their pelts. In the 1830s a wolf pelt was worth only about a dollar; by 1850 the price was up to two. Records of the upper Missouri outfit of the American Fur Trading Company indicate that in 1850 they shipped twenty wolf pelts downriver, but by 1853 the total had jumped to 3,000. Yet this was still primarily incidental killing. The class of men who had wiped out beaver turned now to buffalo, and between 1850 and 1880 they killed over 75 million of these animals, mostly for hides. This incredible slaughter provided wolves with a virtually unlimited supply of meat. As wolves got in the habit of following around after the buffalo hunters to scavenge the carcasses, the hunters began increasingly to shoot them for sport; they took the time to skin them only after they were finished with the buffalo.
With the gold rushes of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s there came teamsters, bullwhackers, and mule skinners to transport ore and supplies. In winter when the wagons couldn’t move easily these idled men turned to wolfing. It was easier than buffalo hunting, which required moving around looking for the animals and wrestling with large carcasses. All a wolfer had to do was set out strychnine and gather in the dead at two dollars a hide.
By 1860, then, a large number of men were out on the plains looking for quick money—in minerals, transportation, land, anything—looking to make a killing. Few did. The thousands who didn’t rode herd on other men’s cattle, built other men’s railroads, fenced other men’s land, processed the ore from other men’s mines. It was mostly these men who took up wolfing as a formal occupation to make their grubstake. First the money came from the wolf hides alone, then it was for the bounty, too. In the thirty years after 1865 they killed virtually every wolf from Texas to the Dakotas, from Missouri to Colorado. But most of them stayed poor, drifting on to other jobs on the frontier.
It cost a wolfer about $150 to outfit himself for the winter season when pelts were prime. This included food and clothing plus a wagon, horses, cooking gear, rifle, skinning knife, and the essential supply of strychnine, usually in crystalline sulfate form. From this investment he might expect to make anywhere from one to three thousand dollars for three or four months’ work. As in the case of the gold miner and the land speculator, he had no concept of prior or inherent rights; the wolves, like the gold and the land and buffalo, were there for the taking.
A wolfer spent each day in the same routine. In the afternoon he would ride out and shoot two or three buffalo and lace the carcasses with strychnine. The next morning he would return to dress out the ten or twenty victims. One wolfer, Robert Peck, left a record of his days in a journal that was later turned into a book, The Wolf Hunters, by George Bird Grinnell. Peck mustered out of the army in 1861, and he and two friends set up a wolf camp about twenty-five miles north of Fort Larned, Kansas. Over the winter they killed 3,000 animals: 800 wolves, more than 2,000 coyotes, and about 100 foxes. Wildlife was so plentiful (biological historians think the fauna of the Great Plains at this time was as rich as it had ever been anywhere in the world) that they never had to go more than ten miles from camp to shoot whooping crane, deer, antelope, and small game for food or buffalo for baits. The wolf pelts brought $1.25 each, the coyotes $.75, and the foxes $.25 at Fort Larned in the spring of 1862. The three men split about $2,500.
Hundreds of similar outfits in succeeding years killed an unfathomable number of animals: buffalo, the last few beaver, antelope (the strip of backstrap meat brought $.25), and all the animals that fed on the poisoned meat—ferrets, skunks, badgers, weasels, eagles, ravens, and bears. “The Indians have an especial antipathy to the wolfer,” wrote J. H. Taylor in Twenty Years on the Trapline. “Poisoned wolves and foxes in their dying fits often slobber upon the grass, which becoming sun dried holds its poisonous properties a long time, often causing the death months or even years after of the pony, antelope, buffalo and other animals feeding upon it. The Indians losing their stock in this way feel like making reprisals, and often did.”
Overlapping the period of wolfing for pelts—most of them were shipped to Russia and Europe for coats—was the development of the livestock industry that would seal the wolf’s doom. In the spring of 1858 a herd of oxen that had been abandoned to shift for itself on the high pastures of Colorado the previous fall was found fat and healthy. The commercial value of America’s great interior grasslands was suddenly recognized, and the industry that would be the most important economic activity in the West in the 1880s began laying its foundation. Enterprising cattlemen bought up vast areas of cheap grazing land. The indigenous browsers and grazers were replaced with cattle. By 1870 most of the commercial wolfers were working for cattlemen, killing wolves that could no longer find buffalo to eat and were turning to domestic stock.
It was during this period, 1875 to 1895, that the slaughter of wolves on the plains reached its peak. Spurred by the promises of substantial state and local, as well as stockmen’s associations, bounties, a market value for the pelts, and the possibility of hiring on somewhere as a wolfer for wages, thousands of men bought up enormous quantities of strychnine and rode out pell-mell on the range. They lay down poisoned meat everywhere, in lines as long as 150 miles. The more demented among them shot small birds, carefully painted a thin paste of strychnine solution under the skin at the breast bone, and then scattered these about the prairie. Ranch dogs died. Children died. Everything that ate meat died. The greed, the ready availability of poison, and a refusal to consider the consequences generated a holocaust.
Stanley Young, an historian of the period, writes: “Destruction by this strychnine campaign … has hardly been exceeded in North America, unless by the slaughter of the passenger pigeon, the buffalo and the antelope. There was a sort of unwritten law of the range that no cowman would knowingly pass by a carcass of any kind without inserting in it a goodly dose of strychnine sulfate, in the hope of killing one more wolf.”
There is some irony in the fact that the first strychnine to reach the West came on a boat that was bound for South America—until its crew learned of the California gold strike.
No one knows how many animals were killed on the plains from, say, 1850 to 1900. If you count the buffalo for hides and the antelope for backstraps and the passenger pigeons for target practice and the Indian ponies (by whites, to keep the Indian poor), it is conceivable that 500 million creatures died. Perhaps 1 million wolves; 2 million. The numbers no longer have meaning.
As elusive is an answer to the question of how many wolves were left on the prairies by the time cattle ranching became big business. A nation that wanted beef had to control wolf predation—had to kill wolves—there was no way around that—but it didn’t have to, as it did, kill every last wolf. I remember once asking some Eskimos what they would do about wolves if they were raising reindeer. Would they wipe them out? No, they said. You would have to live with a little predation. The way they put it, speaking of it as they spoke of all things that were subject to natural forces, was, “We know it wouldn’t go one hundred percent for us.”
The wolf was not the cattleman’s only problem. There was weather to contend with, disease, rustling, fluctuating beef prices, the hazards of trail drives, the cost of running such enormous operations. But more and more the cattlemen blamed any economic shortfall on the wolf. You couldn’t control storms or beef prices or prevent hoof and mouth disease, but you could kill wolves. Since nobody cared for wolves, no one thought to put a limit on it; and, in the way angry men pound desks, the wolf was pounded until there was nothing left.
Edward Curnow, in a history of the development of the cattle industry and wolf eradication in Montana, remarks that before about 1878 cattlemen were more worried about Indians killing their cattle than they were about wolves. As the land filled up with other ranchers, as water rights became an issue, and as the Indians were removed to reservations, however, the wolf became, in Curnow’s phrase, “an object of pathological hatred.”
Montana was the center of the cattle-raising industry in the northern plains in the late nineteenth century and what the wolf got there is what he got in the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Colorado.
The first wolf bounty law passed in Montana was in 1884. It offered one dollar for a dead wolf. The first year, 5,450 wolves were turned in for bounty; in 1885, 2,224 were turned in, and 2,587 the next year. Cattlemen, fat on profits from a high beef market in those years and cushioned by a tremendous influx of investor money from the East, were convinced the wolf problem would fade to insignificance. The harsh winter of 1886/87 wiped out 95 percent of some herds and changed the investors’ minds swiftly. Free grazing on public lands ended; speculative money dried up. Suddenly cattlemen who had never before bothered to go out on the range to see their cattle began to count every cow and steer. In 1887 a legislature dominated by mining interests repealed the expensive wolf bounty program. Enraged, conceivably panicked, cattlemen immediately mounted a propaganda campaign to have the law reinstated. The wolf population had thinned out; no one was willing to kill wolves just for the pelt anymore. Bounty money was needed as an incentive. The heart of the campaign was a series of newspaper editorials and widely circulated pamphlets that stressed the dollar damage done to the state economy by wolves. The longer the legislature held out, the more outrageous the claims became. By 1893, when the legislature finally gave in, the desperate stockmen were reporting losses that were mathematical impossibilities.
Wolf-killed Hereford cattle, near Douglas, Arizona.
The effect of this exaggeration was contagious. The Montana sheep industry, which up to this time had lost more animals to bears and mountain lions than to wolves, began to blame its every downward economic trend on the wolf. The 1899 legislature raised the wolf bounty to $5. People went out and killed wolves far and wide, wolves up in the Bitterroot Mountains that had never even seen sheep and cattle. The wolf population declined sharply in the 1890s. Many stockmen, stretching their own credulity to document wolf damage, finally soured on the slaughter. Where before a rancher didn’t dare not support claims of wolf damage, despite any personal feelings to the contrary, for fear he would be without help at roundup time, now men openly declared it was enough. In 1902 the legislature, for the first time, assessed a tax on cattlemen to help defray the mounting cost of wolf bounty payments, which in that year were about $160,000. That turned more cattlemen off. In 1903 the bounty fell to $3 and it looked as though it was over.
But the most bizarre chapter was yet to unfold.
By 1905 wolf predation in Montana was light, but a small cadre of bitter stockmen, unable to stand any loss, obsessed with the idea that the wolf was taking money out of their pockets—what actually galled them was that someone was living for free on their land—not only got the bounty back up to ten dollars but had passed an outrageous law requiring the state veterinarian to inoculate wolves with scarcoptic mange and then turn them loose. Cattlemen were to get fifteen dollars from the legislature for every wolf they trapped for the program. In spite of the ethical outrage, in spite of the fact that it didn’t work, in spite of the fact that a similar disease spread to domestic stock and the federal government forbade human consumption of cattle from some counties, this program was continued for eleven years.
An increased bounty of fifteen dollars in 1911 failed, as had the ten-dollar bounty of 1905, to produce any more bountied wolves. The animal was virtually wiped out, and in 1933 the bounty law in Montana was repealed.
It is hard to look back on this period in American history and understand what motivated men to do what they did, to kill so thoroughly, so far in excess of what was necessary. In Montana in the period from 1883 to 1918, 80,730 wolves were bountied for $342,764.
Near Decker, Wyoming, 1921.
Of all the wild creatures of North America, none are more despicable than wolves. There is no depth of meanness, treachery or cruelty to which they do not cheerfully descend. They are the only animals on earth which make a regular practice of killing and devouring their wounded companions, and eating their own dead. I once knew a male wolf to kill and half devour his female cage-mate, with whom he had lived a year.
In captivity, no matter how well yarded, well fed or comfortable, a wolf will watch and coax for hours to induce a neighbor in the next cage to thrust through tail or paw, so that he may instantly seize and chew it off, without mercy. But in the face of foes capable of defence, even gray wolves are rank cowards, and unless cornered in a den, will not even stop to fight for their own cubs.
—WILLIAM T. HORNADAY
The American Natural History
Men in a speculative business like cattle ranching singled out one scapegoat for their financial losses. Hired hands were readily available and anxious to do the killing. There was a feeling that as long as someone was out killing wolves, things were bound to get better. And the wolf had few sympathizers. The history of economic expansion in the West was characterized by the change or destruction of much that lay in its way. Dead wolves were what Manifest Destiny cost.
By and large, the kinds of men who did the killing in the 1880s and 1890s were drifters who gave strong lip service to Progress, the mandate to subdue the earth, and the ghoulish nature of the wolf. Ben Corbin, a frontier roustabout who at one point killed wolves for a living, left his wolf-hunting wisdom behind in the pages of a privately printed booklet called The Wolf Hunter’s Guide (1901). It is typical of hundreds of other such memoirs in that it has very little to say about how to actually kill wolves but a great deal to say about the Bible, free trade, the privilege of living in a democracy, and the foulness of the wolf’s ways. It expresses the sentiments of the day and is full of bad biology and fantastic calculations. Corbin notes, for example, that for the two-year period 1897/98, 15,211 wolves were turned in for bounty in North Dakota. He proceeds to argue: “There being 1,207,500 wolves in North Dakota, and allowing two pounds of beef per day at 5 cents per pound, to feed them will take for one year 881,475 steers of 1000 pounds each, worth $44,070,750. The wolves will outnumber all other stock after July 4, 1900.
“If there should be no future increase in wolves in three years they would eat meals at the above figures, to the value of $132,212,250, considerably more than the total evaluation of the state ($114,334,428).
“If each man kills a hundred wolves it would take 12,075 men to kill the present wolf crop in one year. During the three months after May 1, 1900, 862,500 wolves are born, or 9,583 per day.
“If 50,000 wolves are killed this summer, next year (1901) at their rate of increase, there will be 5,208,750 wolves at large in North Dakota.”
Corbin’s naïveté would be amusing if such reasoning had not been taken seriously by so many people, including state legislators.
Corbin advises his readers that wolf farming—or raising wolves for bounty—is a good way to supplement income, and readily admits to the common bounty hunter’s practice of raiding dens for wolf pups but leaving the mother to breed the next year.
The author describes himself as a man “with eighty wolf scalps hanging to his belt” when he arrived in Dakota Territory in 1883. He speaks of the wolf as “the enemy of the state … for what greater enemy can the state have than one that is able to wage war on the state’s chief industry both day and night?” For Corbin everything had to be assigned an economic value. Though he tells you no more of the techniques of wolf killing than was common knowledge to be heard at the general store, he says, “I have devoted my life to it, have studied it, have practiced it, till I have it down fine, and believe I should be paid for telling others what it took me so long to learn.”
Perhaps the most revealing statement in Corbin’s long, rambling autobiography is this: “When I drove with my hunting outfit through the city of Bismarck and showed the staring citizens of that metropolis the fruits of my industry I received such marked attention as a politician with a bag of gold in one hand and the constitution in the other might have been proud of.”
Corbin was an eccentric, of course, but he was also a wolf killer. With no social or legal controls on what he could do with wolves, and with stockmen eager to put him to work, he could kill to his heart’s content. If one is looking for villains, however, I think one has also to look beyond Corbin to the ranchers who paid him to do what they were ashamed to do themselves, because they knew men like Corbin wouldn’t quit until there was nothing left to kill.
The wolfer came to regard himself after the turn of the century as a folk hero, as a man of deliverance. Without him the nation, hungry for beef and in need of wool, could not carry on. As his services became less and less required, he billed the wolf more and more as a sagacious and vicious enemy that only he could track down and kill. To this end he supported the outrageous claims of the stockmen who employed him, even when he knew it was all nonsense.
A lot of men were attracted to bounty hunting wolves. It offered money and respectability. An article in Field and Stream in 1886 extolled the adventure to be had, noting that one man “with not much on his hands but idle time, practiced a week at the business in Yellowstone county [Montana], and the result was nine wolf skins and twenty-six coyote skins.” For this the man received in bounty and in payment for the pelts $118.50. The activity was described as “lots of fun,” and the cost “about $5 for strychnine and time. Bait was to be had in one dead animal picked up on the range.”
The appeal of this life was mostly to men with little formal education, at a loss for something to do in life. Many fancied themselves knowledgeable outdoorsmen. Some were; most knew as much about animals as they did about the pyramids. In a pamphlet on wolf trapping one of this fraternity warned that live pups “should never be handled with bare hands, as blood poisoning is likely to result from a bite,” and suggested wearing a brown corduroy suit when working in order to blend into the local vegetation.
Their lack of biological knowledge made them vulnerable to criticism from anyone who knew better and so as a group they developed the habit of bluffing when stockmen questioned them too closely about wolves, and cultivated the aplomb and insouciance of Owen Wister’s Virginian. Over the years their keenest antipathy was reserved for college-educated biologists fresh in the field, for whom they had nothing but contempt. Part of the tragedy—and it was a tragedy—was that wolves who bothered no cattle were hunted down by men who largely wanted to prove to other men that they were no fools.
The situation changed, rather radically in part, when the federal government passed a law in 1915 providing for the extermination of wolves on federal lands. Stockmen for years had been grazing their animals for a pittance on public land and hounding the government to provide them with wolf hunters at government expense. With an appropriation of $125,000, the government hired its first government hunters on July 1, 1915. Between then and June 30, 1942, when the program was terminated, these hunters killed 24,132 wolves, mostly in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and the western Dakotas. The extermination program even included wolves in the country’s national parks.
The government hunters were a different breed from the previous generation of get-rich-quick bounty hunters. They were federal employees who took their work soberly and seriously. They had to; by the time they went to work, the wolves left to be caught were mostly so trap-wise and man-shy that it sometimes took a man six months to catch one animal.
As early as 1910, however, these dwindling wolf populations had created some well-paying jobs for good wolfers. The two- and three-dollar bounties of the 1880s were now as high as $150—the price paid for an adult wolf by the Piceance Creek Stock Growers’ Association of north-central Colorado in 1912. A good trapper working out of a large ranch might expect $200 a month in salary plus his board. In addition he might get as much as $50 from his employer for each adult wolf he killed and $20 for each pup. To that might be added another $5 or $10 from the county and state plus stock association bounty money. One of the trappers of this era, Bill Caywood, made $7,000 over the winter of 1912/13 in stock association bounties alone on the 140 wolves he killed.
Caywood was widely respected among outdoorsmen of the time. He was one of the first hired by the federal government for its program, and he went on to become the best-known government hunter working for the Biological Survey (the forerunner of the Department of the Interior). “Big Bill Caywood,” said a blurb in a 1939 issue of Outdoor Life, “wise in the ways of the savage, cattle-killing lobos, was so good at his job that there’s almost no job left.” Caywood was credited with killing some of the most famous outlaw wolves, all in Colorado: Rags the Digger, the Butcher Wolf, the Cuerno Verde Gray, and the Keystone Pack. But what made the man such a hero in the eyes of those who admired him was that he’d invested all his bounty earnings in land and become a successful rancher in the Horatio Alger tradition. It was a marvelously right, thoroughly American success story. Lost in the telling was Caywood’s habit of sending his son down into wolf dens in the spring to get the wolf pups. And any mention of bounty fraud, which even a man like Cay wood was supposed to countenance as harmless fun.
Getting away with bounty fraud, especially duping a game warden, was considered part of wolfing, it being the conviction of many bounty hunters from the beginning that they provided a service to all mankind for which the compensation was inadequate. A sign hanging in a State Fish and Game office in Pierre, South Dakota, read as follows:
We, the willing
Led by the unknowing
are doing the impossible
for the ungrateful.
We have done so much
for so long
with so little
we are now qualified
to do anything
with nothing.
—THE TRAPPER
If the wolf’s ears were required as proof for bounty payment, dog, fox, coyote, or bobcat ears might be turned in. The ears might be turned in in one county and the nose in another, so the bounty was paid twice. What was turned in was taken out the back door and turned in somewhere else—or back at the same place. Road kills were turned in. Badger noses were turned in. Attempts to control the cheating became as varied as the methods of infraction: oaths that one was not knowingly preserving the life of a female wolf in order to turn her pups in for bounty each spring, or ears or nose or tail having to be removed in the presence of the person paying the bounty. In Washington State the whole wolf had to be turned in and the bone of the right foreleg was to be burned in the presence of two court officials before the pelt was released to the trapper for subsequent sale. Nothing prevented one, of course, from taking those ears over to Idaho or sending the pelt to a friend in Oregon, where it would be stamped, bounty paid, and released again for sale to a furrier. In 1909 the federal government took pity on states whose treasuries were being looted of hundreds of thousands of dollars every year and published a booklet by government hunter Vernon Bailey entitled Key to Animals on which Wolf and Coyote Bounties are Paid, which helped the state officials to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate claims.
Government hunters who couldn’t apply for bounties were less likely to condone this sort of thing and also less prone to exaggerate the wolf’s role in stock predation. With the entry of the federal government into the picture, therefore, the incidence of fraud was reduced and much of the hysteria over wolves abated. In a speech before the Montana Stock Growers’ Association in 1916, Wallis Huidekoper finally said what ranchers had known for a long time: “It is a well-known fact that stock-killing individuals among wolves are only a small portion of their kind inhabiting a given area.” But by then the point was academic. The wolves were gone. In the nine months since this particular program began, Montana’s nine government hunters had found and killed exactly six wolves.
The government hunter went about his business with methodical, bureaucratic dedication. He used poisons to kill the last of the easy ones, then resorted to steel traps and exotic ploys to get the rest. The traps he used were the ones originally designed in 1843 by Sewell Newhouse and manufactured by the Oneida Community in New York, of which Newhouse was a member. Newhouse himself was preoccupied with the trap as a symbol of civilization and recommended that it be incorporated in state seals. In his Trapper’s Guide he says the trap goes before the ax and the plow, forming “the prow with which iron-clad civilization is wolf trap. pushing back barbaric solitude” and causing the wolf to give way “to the wheatfield, the library, and the piano.”
Newhouse #14
Whatever they may have thought of his rhetoric, government trappers had nothing but praise for his traps. The Newhouse #4½ steel wolf trap weighed 5¼ pounds and had smooth jaws. It was the standard wolf trap until the turn of the century, when it was replaced by the Newhouse #14, a toothed trap that held the wolf more securely. A #114 trap was later developed to accommodate the longer foot of Alaskan wolves. All three traps came with a six-foot length of steel chain to which a drag hook was attached. The trap was set in a hole just below the surface of the ground and carefully covered with earth until it was completely concealed. Set in a trail where wolves were likely to step, it was called a blind set; placed near rotting meat, it was a bait set; a scent set was one by a rock or bush on which a pungent homemade mixture had been carefully dripped. Underwater or tidewater sets were also occasionally used, but they could ruin a pelt if not checked frequently.
Strychnine was by 1900 considered too dangerous to use and setting traps was harder than shooting a buffalo and stuffing a fistful of poison in it. You had to find the right place and make a set that would more likely catch a wolf than a badger and not be sprung by range cattle or ruined by rainfall. Understandably, the ranks of professional wolfers thinned out with these requirements.
When he wasn’t tending to traps, the government hunter was looking for dens. The pups were dug out and strangled in the spring. Although the knack for finding dens was much praised, the killing of pups made most men sick. “I have done it many times and since,” wrote one, “but I have never had to do anything that goes against the grain more than to kill the pups at this stage. Potential murderers they may be, but at this time they are just plump, friendly little things that nuzzle you and whine little pleased whines.
“We both felt somewhat ashamed and guilty,” he said, speaking for his partner, “but it was duty.”
The widest public interest in the wolf wars was generated by government hunters’ attempts to capture the last “outlaw wolves.” The stock associations ballyhooed their existence as though they were criminal geniuses that demanded a nation’s attention, when, in fact, many of them were simply the last wolves left in areas where everything to eat but cattle had been wiped out. Others really deserved that reputation. Apparently some wolves spent years in a careful, methodical pattern of destruction that seemed almost designed to enrage ranchers. Certain animals were credited with destroying ten and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of stock in their lifetimes. And they all proved exceedingly difficult to catch.
Curiously, many of these outlaw wolves were white wolves. The Sycan Wolf of Sycan Marsh, Oregon; the Snowdrift Wolf of Judith Basin and the Ghost Wolf of the Little Rockies, both in Montana; the Pine Ridge Wolf and the Custer Wolf from South Dakota; Old Whitey of Bear Springs Mesa, Colorado. And it was said that many of them were born and lived on Indian reservations—the Pryor Creek Wolf on the Crow Reservation, the Ghost Wolf of the Little Rockies on the Fort Belknap Reservation, the Pine Ridge Wolf on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Many of them had toes missing, pulled off in a trap, and one of them, Old Lefty of Burns Hole, Colorado, ran around on three legs.
Of them all, Three Toes of Harding County, South Dakota, was perhaps the most famous. According to Stanley Young, 150 men over a period of thirteen years tried to capture the wolf before a government hunter finally caught him in the summer of 1925. Stockmen credited him with having destroyed fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stock.
The death of one of these animals occasioned parades, banquets, speeches, and the awarding of engraved gold watches.
One of the more poignant stories about an outlaw or renegade wolf concerns the Currumpaw Wolf of northern New Mexico and his mate Blanca, who were killed in 1894 by the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton.
Seton, called in by a concerned rancher who was a friend, tried every sort of set he could devise, to no avail. Each time, the Currumpaw Wolf would dig up and spring the traps or pointedly ignore them.
One evening Seton set out to concoct the be-all-and-end-all of baits:
“Acting on the hint of an old trapper, I melted some cheese together with the kidney fat of a freshly killed heifer, stewing it in a china dish, and cutting it with a bone knife to avoid the taint of metal. When the mixture was cool, I cut it into lumps, and making a hole in the side of each lump I inserted a large dose of strychnine and cyanide, contained in a capsule that was impermeable by any odor; finally I sealed the holes with pieces of the cheese itself. During the whole process, I wore a pair of gloves steeped in the hot blood of the heifer, and even avoided breathing on the baits. When all was ready, I put them in a raw-hide bag rubbed all over with blood, and rode forth dragging the liver and kidneys of the beef at the end of a rope. With this I made a ten mile circuit, dropping a bait at each quarter mile, and taking the utmost care, always, not to touch any with my hands.”
Seton’s caution and arcane science were techniques much praised by wolfers of the time. The Currumpaw Wolf, for his part, carefully gathered four of the baits in a pile and defecated on them.
OUTLAWS
Three Toes of Harding County, South Dakota
Old Whitey, Bear Springs Mesa, Colorado
Big Foot, Lane County, Colorado
The Truxton Wolf, Arizona
Lobo, King of Currumpaw, northern New Mexico
White Wolf, Pine Ridge, South Dakota
Rags the Digger, Cathedral Bluffs, Colorado
The Traveler, west-central Arkansas
Virden Wolf, Virden, Manitoba
Old Lefty, Burns Hole, Colorado
Custer Wolf, Custer, South Dakota
Aquila Wolf, western Arizona
Cody’s Captive, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Mountain Billy, Medora, North Dakota
Sycan Wolf, Sycan Marsh, Oregon
Queen Wolf, Unaweep Canyon, Colorado
Black Buffalorunner, Carberry, Manitoba
The Greenhorn Wolf, southern Colorado
Three Toes of the Apishapa, Colorado
Werewolf of Nut Lake, Ft. Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan
Split Rock Wolf, west–central Wyoming
Snowdrift Wolf, Judith Basin, Montana
Pryor Creek Wolf, southeastern Montana
Pine Ridge Wolf, southeastern South Dakota
Ghost Wolf of the Little Rockies, north-central Montana
The female wolf, Blanca, was finally caught in a steel trap in the spring of 1894. Seton and a companion approached the wolf on horseback. “Then followed the inevitable tragedy, the idea of which I shrank from afterward more than at the time. We each threw a lasso over the neck of the doomed wolf, and strained our horses in opposite directions until the blood burst from her mouth, her eyes glazed, her limbs” stiffened and then fell limp.”
The dead female was taken back to the ranch. The male, abandoning all his former caution, followed her and the next day stepped into a nest of traps set around the ranch buildings. He was chained up and left for the night but was found dead in the morning, without a wound or any sign of a struggle. Seton, deeply moved by what had happened, placed his dead body in the shed next to Blanca’s.
The price offered to the man who would kill the Currumpaw Wolf was one thousand dollars. Seton never says whether he took it. (In a long short story called “Wolf Tracker” by Zane Grey, which appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1924, the hero, Brink, walks a wolf to exhaustion and strangles him. Offered the five-thousand-dollar reward, he says a few words about the nobility of wolves and the poorness of human spirits and rides off.)
After the outlaw wolves were caught, government hunters turned to other predators. No one knows the dates when the last wolves disappeared, but by 1945 there were only stragglers. A few Mexican wolves drifting north into southern Arizona and New Mexico. A few British Columbia wolves moving south into northern Washington and Idaho. Some northern Rocky Mountain wolves coming into Glacier National Park in Montana and, rarely, down into the Bitterroot Mountains. But for a single pocket in northern Minnesota, a few on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, there were no more gray wolves in the lower forty-eight states.
There had never been a killing like it.
The final act of the wolf war in North America was staged in Canada in the 1950s.
The section of Ontario adjacent to the United States and southern sections of the prairie provinces had been involved in America’s wolf war early on. Ontario established a wolf bounty in 1793, Alberta not until 1899, and British Columbia in 1909. Canadian wolf populations began to decline steadily west of Manitoba after 1900 under increased bounty pressure. By 1948 attention had shifted north to the Northwest Territories, where the herds of barren ground caribou were declining. Almost in a panic, the Crown and provincial governments set in motion the most intensively organized wolf-control program ever mounted.
It was never argued that there was any other cause than excessive human hunting for the caribou decline, but it was decided to remove substantial numbers of wolves anyway because the situation was critical. Between 1951 and 1961, 17,500 wolves were poisoned. In 1955, when most of the wolf range in northern Canada was covered with poison bait stations (some of them poisoned wolf carcasses) served by airplane, the take reached 2,000 animals a year. Some attempt was made to keep the baits in areas where they would not harm other wildlife. Nevertheless, in one area, from 1955 to 1959, 496 red fox, 105 arctic fox, and 385 wolverines were killed, along with 3,417 wolves.
The caribou herds recovered and the program was terminated.
When the herds first began to thin in the north in 1948, some wolves apparently drifted south into Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and Alberta’s Veterinary Services Branch claimed an antirabies campaign was needed to protect people against possibly rabid wolves. Behind the prop of a public health program an astonishing arsenal of poison was distributed: 39,960 cyanide guns, 106,100 cyanide cartridges, and 628,000 strychnine pellets. Sodium fluoroacetate (1080) poison bait stations were increased from 25 in 1951 to 800 by 1956. There is no record of the number of wolves that were killed, along with 246,800 coyotes, but in all that time exactly one rabid wolf was diagnosed, in 1952.
British Columbia established a Predator Control Division, ostensibly to assist cattle ranchers in the south, but under pressure from professional guides and outfitters it concentrated its efforts in the north where wolves preyed on big game.
Wolf bounties were dropped in the western provinces in the mid-fifties in favor of using provincial hunters in certified problem areas. Ontario struck its bounty on wolves in 1972, Quebec in 1971. Between 1935 and 1955, about twenty thousand wolves were bountied in British Columbia; between 1942 and 1955, about twelve thousand in Alberta; and between 1947 and 1971, about thirty-three thousand in Ontario.
Recently in the 1970s a declining deer population in Quebec triggered a vigorous antiwolf campaign. Antiwolf sentiment is also still strong in coastal British Columbia, another deer hunting area. In the Yukon, complaints from guides and outfitters that wolves bother their horses (grazing free on Crown lands) and elk (artificially introduced) have resulted in a wolf-control program there. In northeastern British Columbia guides apparently have kept up a private wolf-poisoning program to protect trophy Dall sheep for their clients.
At present, however, the wolf population of Canada seems fairly healthy. Canada got into and out of unlimited warfare on wolves rather quickly. Major portions of Canada are still only thinly settled, and in these areas wolf populations have recovered from the effects of the poisoning campaigns.
The state of Alaska established a wolf bounty in 1915, but the number of wolves killed there in the past sixty years has not seemed to affect the overall population, which remains somewhere between five and ten thousand. The Mexican wolf population, on the other hand, has declined precipitously in the last thirty years. Livestock interests have expanded into former wolf ranges and human hunters have reduced the wild game populations of deer, bighorn sheep, and antelope that wolves feed on. The owners of large ranchos pay no attention to Mexico’s wolf protection statutes, and there is little hope that the Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) will survive except in isolated pockets. (One such region is in southern Durango, where the wolves are protected by the Tepehuanan Indians.)
Incredibly, the unrestrained savagery that was once a part of wolf killing in the United States continues with efforts in America to control “brush wolves,” or coyotes. These animals are hunted down by ranchers from helicopters with shotguns. Their dens are dynamited. Their mouths are wired shut and they are left to starve. They are strung up in trees and picked apart with pistol fire. They are doused with gasoline and ignited.
All this was done to the wolf—and more. One of the cowhand’s favorite ruses was to stake out a dog in heat in hopes of attracting a male wolf. During a copulatory tie the animals cannot break apart. Thus trapped, the wolf was clubbed to death.
It seems to me that somewhere in our history we should have attempted to answer to ourselves for all this. As I have tried to make clear, the motive for wiping out wolves (as opposed to controlling them) proceeded from misunderstanding, from illusions of what constituted sport, from strident attachment to private property, from ignorance and irrational hatred. But the scope, the casual irresponsibility, and the cruelty of wolf killing is something else. I do not think it comes from some base, atavistic urge, though that may be a part of it. I think it is that we simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.
I would like to close this chapter with a few observations on some of the people I spoke with while I was writing this book: Dave Wallace, who lived out on the Oregon desert; a retired wolf trapper in Minnesota; a government hunter from North Dakota; and an aerial hunter from Alaska.
These men were not barbarians. They all liked wolves and were sorry for the killing. They grew up in hard times and today they are not rich. There is cause in their lives for bitterness, but they are not bitter. They are patient men. They have cultivated patience. It fills a human need, I suppose, to believe that the wolf is an incredibly intelligent animal, very difficult to trap. Stories like that about the Currumpaw Wolf and the other outlaws tend to support the idea but, really, the wolf wasn’t all that hard to trap. What it took more than anything else was patience. To make a good set and just wait till a wolf stepped in it.
Each of these men hunted wolves for bounty in a different way. They were not particularly vain men, but they knew what they did was done well. They smile whenever you mention the equipment fetishes of some of the old trappers, the wolf tail used to dust off the ground after the trap was set, or the concoctions of store-bought, sure-fire wolf scent advertised in trapper magazines in the twenties. They knew in the end it all came down to work and to being careful and to knowing the wolf and the land he lived in. One of these old men knew as much about wolves as some of the biologists I’d spoken with, but without a formal education, a good suit of clothes, and a set of teeth he was hard pressed to communicate it to anyone.
They’d been in a grim business but they had not thought much about it at the time. It was, as the man who killed the pups said, duty. They would tell you stories of horror, and struggle to find their own reasons and end up silent, beaten by history, by something they couldn’t understand.
They remembered some tight times. The Minnesota trapper was attacked by a wolf in a trap and bitten. The government hunter was threatened with losing his job when he refused to kill a wolf that wasn’t killing stock but which local cattle ranchers, well connected politically, claimed was.
They remembered things that made you laugh. An inexperienced man who tried to kill wolf pups underground with a .45 and broke both eardrums with the first shot. A North Dakota rancher who admitted one day he didn’t really know how to tell a coyote from a wolf but he was pretty sure it was wolves that were running his horses around the corrals at night. It turned out to be his own dog and two feral Irish setters.
They remembered when the last wolf around them was killed. “The last gray wolf killed in eastern Montana was in June 1927, over in the Lone Pine Hills, over east of Ekalaka in what is now Carter County.” They remembered it that well, staring now out the window of a battered trailer house at the vision, as though they wished they might have gone then, too.
They’d been on the bad side of the law. The aerial hunter and his son had been fined for illegally hunting wolves from the air. The trapper had been fined for bounty fraud.
You could not blame these men, at least I could not, for what they had done, as though it had all happened in a vacuum. The aerial hunter, trapping on the ground one year, caught a large male black wolf in one of his traps. As he approached, the wolf lifted his trapped foot, extended it toward him, and whined softly. “I would have let him go if I didn’t need the money awful bad,” he said quietly.
The old trapper I met in Minnesota I think is a tragic figure. There was, at the time I spoke with him, an argument over the status of the wolf in Minnesota. He, and others, claimed there were too many in the northeastern corner and that they were killing all the deer and should be trapped out. Others, particularly people outside the state, thought the wolf should be federally protected as an endangered species. The old man had a stake in this argument, and for him it was larger than the fate of the wolf. It was his own. He was staring at the end of his life.
He told me stories of wolf predation that were clearly exaggerations, and admitted freely that they were. But he persisted in telling the stories, and as the statewide controversy wore on, he became more and more insistent on the truth of his silly stories about bloodthirsty wolves and wanton slaughter. He wanted, more than anything else, a reinstatement of the wolf bounty program. I could not understand what he was thinking about until one day I drove him over to a friend’s house, a man in his eighties with whom he’d once trapped.
As these two men talked with each other about the early days with wolves, they were saying to anyone listening that they wanted to be needed. If no one needed wolves trapped anymore there wasn’t any reason for them to be around. They were useless. So they talked each other up about what a killer the wolf was, and how hard he was to trap, because that’s what they wanted their neighbors to believe. They wanted the attention and respect they used to get in a township, young boys tagging after them, men their own age cheering their shenanigans with the game wardens. It was all slipping away from them now.
That afternoon the old man had shown me three wolves hanging up in his garage. Under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act he could have been fined twenty thousand dollars for each one. He told me he didn’t give a damn. He’d gotten a call from the owner of a cattle ranch north of his place to come up and trap out wolves that were “bothering stock.” He had not asked, as he would have done in the old days, to see the tracks, to see a kill, to see evidence. He just set his traps. And he got three wolves.
As the three of us sat in the small, overheated house that afternoon in Minnesota, looking at sepia-toned prints from years ago, I felt very bad for the old men. They had little left but these pictures in their lap, nothing but the yellow newspaper clippings crumbling in their weathered hands, even as they showed them to me.
We killed hundreds of thousands of wolves. Sometimes with cause, sometimes with none. In the end, I think we are going to have to go back and look at the stories we made up when we had no reason to kill, and find some way to look the animal in the face again.