But with the coming of the railroads in the 1860s and 1870s, that changed. A new kind of livestock industry appeared in the West. With access to eastern markets, investors poured large numbers of cattle onto the western range. Instead of the wild Mexican steers, they substituted more docile Herefords, Durhams, and Anguses, breeds that clustered around water sources and ran from wolves. Drought recurrently decimated these herds, and the investment ranchers looked to trim what adversities they could. There wasn’t a thing they could do about the weather. But they could do something about predators.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, western ranchers set up local bounty systems, and many of the larger ranches hired their own “wolfers.” They bought wagonloads of strychnine. Anywhere a cowhand found a dead cow or deer or dog, he would get down from his horse and lace the meat with poison. Stanley Young wrote in Last of the Loners, “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, in the hope of killing one more wolf.”
The poisoned wolves could then be submitted for bounties. Montana initiated a bounty in 1884, Arizona and New Mexico in 1893. In thirty-five years, more than eighty thousand wolves were submitted for bounty payments in Montana. Between 1895 and 1917, bounties were paid on more than thirty-six thousand wolves in Wyoming. The programs invited behavior we can today only consider insane. From 1905 to 1916, a Montana law required the state veterinarian to inoculate captured wolves with sarcoptic mange and turn them loose. Cowboys roped wolves, strung them between horses, and spurred the horses until the wolves were torn apart. They doused wolves in gasoline and set them afire.
The madness required justification. There were in these years fantastic estimates of the carnage supposed to be caused by wolves. Ben Corbin’s The Wolf Hunter’s Guide in 1901 calculated that there were more than a million wolves in North Dakota, that each consumed two pounds of beef a day, and that feeding them cost North Dakota over $44 million a year, and that it would take more than twelve thousand men killing a hundred wolves apiece to get rid of the problem. Arizona stock-growers estimated in 1917 that predators cost them $2.7 million a year. Curiously, seventy years later, when Dan Gish, a former wolf trapper himself, collected the annual reports of the Arizona federal wolf hunters from 1915 on, he found that the pages reporting stomach contents of the wolves taken had all been removed. In the 1918 report from New Mexico, of 189 wolves taken by the federal trappers, only 13 had beef in their stomachs.
The extravagant claims pushed counties and legislatures to keep the bounties coming. Ranchers pressed the economic argument, claiming that, since they leased grazing rights on public lands, those lands ought to come free of the costs of predators. They persuaded the United States Congress in 1915 to give the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of the Biological Survey funds with which to eradicate wolves on the public lands. The law established the Predatory Animal and Rodent Control Service, which employed hunters to trap and poison wolves, mountain lions, coyotes, and bears.
By the time PARC was established, poison had already eliminated all but the wariest of wolves, the wolves that were unlikely to take poison or step into a trap or the vee of a gunsight. Frustrated bounty hunters attributed to these remaining wolves extraordinary qualities. A wolf in the Chiricahua Mountains was said to have taken a cow every four days for at least four years. Old Aguila, a wolf that eluded Arizona trappers for eight years, was said to have cost $25,000 in stock. Individual wolves grew legendary, and before the war years were over, wolfers were selling tales of mythical wolves to popular magazines. Stanley Young, for example, in Last of the Loners, described Three Toes of the Apishapa, a wolf that was noble by day and diabolical by night: “Happy, carefree, led by the spirits of the wild,” Three Toes and his mate “played in open sunny places, and then on dark nights trotted through the dusk, slaughtering and gorging in a bacchanalian orgy of blood feast.” When Three Toes’ mate was poisoned, the wolf howled in anguish, and then “there was new hate, new viciousness, new striking back at man.” As the trapper approached, Three Toes waited: “Keen wolf teeth, bloodthirsty, ready to snap the veins in the throat of man, were at the end of his quest, and he could not come within their reach until they were made harmless.” The trapper, the model of hard work and intelligent progress, always won.
In practice, the world of wolf control was less heroic and less dutiful. Bounty hunters sometimes left the dens untouched in order to ensure continued production of wolves on which to collect paychecks and bounties. They sometimes submitted the ears or noses of dogs or badgers or coyotes as those of wolves. And they sometimes turned in parts of animals for bounties in one county, sneaked them out the back door, and sold them again in another. In 1909, Vernon Bailey, a biologist with the Bureau of the Biological Survey, wrote a Key to the Animals on which Wolf and Coyote Bounties are Paid, to help county and state agents determine whether they were getting badger or dog parts from a professed wolfer. To keep the federal PARC trappers from abusing the bounty systems, the government required them to turn in the pelts, which the service then sold.
Because they were pursuing the last and wariest of wolves, PARC hunters became more skillful, more patient, more persistent than the run-of-the-mill bounty hunters. They set their traps around wolf-killed livestock, hoping the wolves would return, or set them on wolf runways, where they had found wolf urine or scats and knew wolves would return to sniff and leave scents. They spent months in pursuit of a single wolf.
But the traps merely finished off the toughest cases; it was poison that did the wolf in. Cowboys and trappers alike sprinkled strychnine crystals or inserted capsules of it into incisions in a carcass. Strychnine had a bitter, quininelike taste that caused wolves to spit it out, so trappers molded the tablets into balls of fat from the back of a wild burro or horse and scattered the baits around a wolf runway or a dead deer or cow. PARC hunters treated thirteen million acres of Arizona with such baits in 1923. They killed ravens, coyotes, foxes, wolverines, weasels, eagles, dogs, and human children with their poisons, but the justice of their cause was deemed unassailable. Mark Musgrave closed his newsletter to hunters, “Remember our Slogan, ‘Bring Them in Regardless of How.’ ”
And his hunters did. Within three years, PARC hunters eliminated the last fourteen hundred gray wolves from Texas. By 1925, it was concluded that no wolves were rearing young in New Mexico, and in 1926, Musgrave reported from Arizona, “There are no more wolves left inside the borders of our state.”
When wolves grew rare, coyotes kept the federal control agents in the field. After 1940, when the Bureau of the Biological Survey was merged into the new Fish and Wildlife Service in the U.S. Department of the Interior, federal trappers put out traps and poison for predators. (In 1974, the program took the name of Animal Damage Control.) Federal agents developed new methods of coyote control. One was the “coyote getter,” a .38-caliber shell fixed to a firing-pin mechanism and mounted on a stake in the ground. When a coyote or wolf took the exposed end in its teeth, the device fired a charge of sodium cyanide into the animal’s mouth, bringing death within seconds. A later, spring-loaded version of the device was called the M-44, because it had a mechanical firing mechanism and an enlarged shell-bore of .44 caliber. Coyote getters were not always carefully used. In 1952, PARC hunters set some at a rest stop along a major highway in Arizona, and several dogs were killed.
The fate of the wolf in the West was sealed in 1948, when a new poison, sodium monofluoroacetate, came into use. The chemical had been developed by the Army during World War II to kill rats in Southeast Asia. Modified by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists to kill predators, the formulation they arrived at was the 1080th compound they tried, and it became known as Compound 1080. Agents injected the tasteless, odorless substance into a freshly killed horse or burro, where it diffused to the whole body of the corpse, and remained potent for months. It was said to be selective, to kill only ca
nids when used in proper doses. But in the field it was impossible to use only proper doses, and it killed bears, bobcats, badgers, foxes, skunks, raccoons, and carrion-eating birds such as eagles, magpies, and condors. In 1950, Fish and Wildlife Service officials went to Mexico to show U.S. ranchers there how to use it. Before the end of the decade, U.S. officials claimed complete control of wolves in northern Chihuahua.
These chemical predacides allowed predator-control programs to cover vast areas with little manpower. And though they didn’t eliminate coyotes, they eradicated wolves. The last wolf was taken from Utah in 1929, from Colorado in 1943. The last “documented” wolf in New Mexico was a dead wolf, probably the victim of poisoning, found in 1970. Two wolves were taken in southwestern Texas the same year. The last wolf trapped in Arizona was taken quietly for a bounty offered by ranchers around 1976. Nobody was willing to say when the wolf was taken, because by then the wolf was on the endangered-species list, and killing it would have been illegal.
There was something both colorful and tragic about the era of wolf control—colorful because the stories the bounty hunters told romanticized the wolf and lent to the country a deeper mystery and a moral import, but tragic because the policy eradicated the wolf and damaged whole ecosystems. It also damaged the West’s view of itself as something new, innocent, and pure of heart. The trappers would lose more than anyone: with the loss of the wolf would come the loss of their own identities.
• • •
Dan Gish was one of the last of the wolfers of the Southwest. I visited him at his home, a low, earth-colored house on a dirt street just outside Mesa, Arizona. The house is shaded with palo verde and other desert trees, and three large saguaros grow in the yard. Outside, it is leafy and overgrown. Inside, the walls are paneled with composite. The name “Jesus” is spelled in large cutout letters on one wall, and old illustrations are framed on another. Gish lives on a small pension and the house makes little boast of the American dream.
Gish has diabetes. Confined most of the time to a wheelchair, he loses sensation in his legs and feet. He gets up from the table in the living room and has walked across the room before he stops to look down and see if he still has his slippers. One of them has fallen off. “I’m not a failure,” he says in answer to a question he has asked himself. “I succeeded in everything I undertook,” he says. But it’s clear he’s struggling.
Gish has small, tight blue eyes set in a broad, beefy face. His hair is still full, dark, and wavy, graying only at the sides. Gish can be offhand, but he is not a man who smiles easily. He is watchful, perhaps apprehensive; he asks if I mind if he tapes our interview. Though he is passionate about his ideas, his sentences tend to swirl off into eddies of anger and bitterness.
His life, as he recounts it, runs a trail like that of a wolf pursued through a hard and unforgiving world. As a young man, Gish had trapped foxes, skunks, and weasels in the Midwest. When he worked in a factory in Milwaukee, he saw in it only an affirmation that humankind is greedy and corrupt. He joined the service in World War II, and at the end of the war he went west and found a job as an information officer for the Arizona Department of Game and Fish. Within a year, he was putting out strychnine drop baits to kill coyotes, in an effort to restore the deer population in the White Mountains. And in the course of that project, he started working with wolfers.
In the 1940s, wolfers still bore a tinge of romance. They worked alone in remote areas. If they were skillful, ranchers valued them highly. Stanley Young would write of them in Last of the Loners, “Dogged in a hunt, untiring in upbuilding of communities, quiet, high-powered, these men have been the bulwark of western progress.” Gish still wears across his ample midsection a silver belt buckle given to him by a Sonoran rancher, General Alfonso Morales, whom he helped to dispatch wolves.
He speaks of the other trappers he knew as a select group of men. “These old trappers were peculiar individuals,” he says. “They were cocky about themselves. They wouldn’t share information. Dore Green, the head of PARC in Chicago, would try to get these guys together for meetings to demonstrate methods that were successful, and they would not do it. They would be squatting around a campfire at night, and if anybody tried to get them to share their method, they would just disappear.”
In 1945, Gish began to work with Bill Casto, who had been trapping wolves since 1909. “He was an incredible naturalist and a loner and the best man at the job. It was an unbelievable education. He dragged me down into Sonora and Chihuahua. I participated with him in the capture of twenty-six wolves, all of them Mexican.”
Canis lupus baileyi, the Mexican wolf, is the subspecies of gray wolf that ranged from southern Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona south into central Mexico. “These Mexican wolves have longer ears than the northern wolves,” says Gish. “A Mexican wolf has longer legs. They’re rangy. They have a deep but narrow chest, and the shoulders are very close together. From what I have observed in the field, with Casto and on my own, I think the range of a Mexican wolf extends three or four times more than a wolf on Isle Royale or up in Alaska, where the vegetation is contiguous and prey factors are different.
“Most of the Mexican wolves we found in Arizona were young, and most of them were males. But almost no reproduction. No denning. We only found one den, and that was on the east side of the Huachucas.” Wolves then were highly migratory. The resident wolves had been exterminated, but, says Gish, “There was quite a bit of migration up out of the northern third of Mexico into this state. The movement of these wolves was in the vacuum created by the lack of wolves here. And they were exploratory and circuitous. Those that survived the trappers and ranchers followed a path back into Mexico.
“Bill knew the routes of these wolves. When word came of a kill, Bill went to where they would travel next. Wolves on the move will travel the highest ridges, the kind we called ‘military ridges.’ In the area here, the mountains were islands, and the desert between them didn’t provide much food. Wolves also have a tendency to want to look down on the area they are in. Bill would determine where a wolf was likely to trail and he would set traps.”
Gish trapped with Casto and on his own. When he got a wolf in a trap, it would act with submission and resignation, “as if it was almost in a trance.” He would walk up to the trapped wolf and club it to death.
There were no biological studies of wolves in the Southwest, and no resident populations for a biologist to examine. Gish was asked by Charles Voorhies of the Izaak Walton League to do a study of the characteristics of these transient Mexican wolves. He was to accompany trappers like Casto, for they were the reigning authorities on wolves. It was an era in which old PARC trappers were cashing in on their experiences by telling tales to magazines of great wolf hunts and supernatural wolves. Charlie Gillham, who had poisoned a wolf that inhabited the low desert along the Gila River, turned that wolf into a legend in magazine articles about the Gila Wolf. “Every wolf was about forty feet high and consumed tons and tons of cattle and sheep, chickens, snakes, and acorns,” says Gish.
Gish prided himself on being able to distinguish between story and lore. “These Mexican wolves never would try to pull down a cow on a range unless they turned it around and stampeded it. They almost always attacked its flanks.” He guesses he has seen “maybe half a hundred” wolf kills, largely in Mexico, and all were of livestock. Most of the reports wolfers got of wolves were complaints from livestock owners, but they also followed up on other reports. “I’ve got a report of an old woman sitting on a privy in an outhouse in the rain and a wolf came and bumped the door open.” In another report, “a male and a female wolf came down to a ranch down in the Chiricahuas, a couple of years ago. Their dogs barked at the wolves. Then the dogs ran. One of them lost its tail to one of the wolves, and hid under the porch of the house, where it died.” In another, “a guy walked up to Big Lake in the spring, when it was still muddy. He saw a wolf jumping up and down in those thick weeds that come with the rains, jumping up and down, catching mice.
“Even when you’re hunting wolves, the admiration for the animal’s activities is tremendous. They have something no other animal has. They actually challenge you. They can come out with things that will astonish you.” A trapper might pursue one wolf for months and see nothing more substantial than its tracks and the bones of its kills. Wolves would dig up the traps and leave them sprung and empty, as if to spite the trappers. “Bill Casto gloried in it. And he got a big kick out of it if they got the best of him.”
Wolves back then didn’t exactly thrive: Gish found that, when wolves managed to den, they had an average of five pups, but only an average of two survived the first six months. The rest, he guessed, starved. “I got the sense not all attacks by wolves were successful, even on domestic cattle. I think that the wolf’s fear of being put out of commission entered into a lot of decisions in preying situations. I saw very little evidence of ruthless attacks. They just didn’t take many chances.” He describes seeing tracks indicating that wolves came upon cattle at a watering place at night and “walked around and around just keeping the cows restless. You could see where one of ’em would tramp around in one spot and circle and circle and circle. Then you can see where the steer kicked out and ran and the wolf followed,” and made the kill.
The more he talks, the more Gish’s face softens, the more his mind takes his body back to the days when it did not betray him. He recalls a wolf that killed cows in the Canelo Hills, and as he recounts finding the wolf’s track and following it into the hills, he seems to rediscover an old truth, and he breaks into the story to exclaim, “They so intrigued you that you couldn’t let go. You realized you didn’t know half what you thought you did, and you wanted to keep going on. You couldn’t let go.
The Company of Wolves Page 6