Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  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 beg
an 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.