The Wolfer
Page 14
"Perhaps you should have posted a bounty."
"The thought of a reward occurred to me," said the other, ignoring the irresistible barb. "In this mood, I am tempted still. But we found the bodies of Sam Fire Eye and Dick Lightfoot at the base of Angel's Peak, and from their condition it appears that you were telling the truth about what happened up there."
Fulwider studied him. "Does that mean North is no longer wanted?"
"I just finished wiring cancellations to my pick-up order. Not that any are needed, the way he operates."
"Then I'm free to go?"
The sheriff rumpled his hair energetically, releasing a cloud of yellow dust. " 'Go' is the most important word in that question. Go, and keep going. Since you are not wanted for anything either, I have no authority to order you out of town, but Mrs. Adamson and I would consider your loss a great gain, if you understand a foreigner's use of the language."
"When is the next train east?" asked the other.
FINAL NOTES
In one of those twists of fate that so delight historians, a bounty of sorts was eventually paid on the hide of Black Jack, though the amount and the circumstances could hardly have been predicted.
Months after the events described in the previous narrative, an itinerant hunter roaming the forests east of the Caribou Mountains came upon the bones of a large wolf nearly a mile below Angel's Peak. On a hunch he claimed one of the few remaining patches of black-and-gray hide, cured it and sold it for whiskey money in Rebellion. The patch, eighteen inches long and shaped somewhat like a bow tie, eventually found its way into the hands of Nelson Meredith, who displayed it on a wall in his office until his dismissal following an audit of Newcastle accounts in 1888. It disappeared for a time, resurfacing behind the bar of the Timber Queen saloon in 1905, where it was destroyed in a fire that swept through town two years later. At that point, both it and Rebellion passed from the western scene.
The anonymous drifter who had sold the piece of pelt was one of the last to benefit from the slaughter locally, for the Idaho Stockmen's Association defaulted on all its debts after the terrible winter of 1886-87 brought a howling finish to the American West's thirty-year role as beef-supplier to the world. A triple-edged sword, the disaster also prompted the investigation ordered by Newcastle's Sheffield investors that resulted in the manager's disgrace, and robbed the nearby community of its livelihood, the wolfing trade. Thus were sown the seeds of its destruction twenty years before the great fire.
R. G. Fulwider returned to New York in the spring of 1886, with his cough and a suitcase bulging with notes scribbled in the fever of his confinement in the Assiniboin Inn. He was astonished upon entering the offices of the World to find himself a local hero, not only because of his experiences in the wild, but also on the basis of the rumor that he had spent time in a frontier jail on a charge of gunslinging. His attempts to convince his superiors and fellow workers of both his innocence and the fact that he had spent his imprisonment in a hotel room and not behind bars proved fruitless. Joseph Pulitzer congratulated him in person upon his miraculous "escape" and promoted him to the World's elite corps of troubleshooting reporters. In this capacity, his scarecrow frame was seen dangling from steam cranes over burning buildings and bobbing among crowds of police officers during raids on moonlit gambling establishments for months until someone in authority came to his senses and returned him to his rightful station behind a desk.
Fulwider died at his home in upstate New York in 1913. His age alone (69) has led physicians interested in his complaint to suggest that what his doctors diagnosed as "consumptive bronchitis" was in his case more bronchitic than consumptive. Whatever his handicap, it failed to stand in the way of a momentous career that included service as a correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and ended with an appointment by the Governor of the State of New York to fill out the unexpired term of a United States Senator. His plans to seek a term on his own were interrupted by his sudden death due to heart failure.
In 1902 the former journalist, besieged with requests to publish an account of the time he spent with Asa North in the mountains, engaged an operative of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to locate the Wolfer. It was a difficult assignment, as evidenced by the agent's lengthy typewritten report submitted twelve weeks later, detailing quite as many false trails and hardships as complained of by Sheriff Adamson sixteen years earlier. Clipped to it was a travel worn letter in a woman's clear, firm hand, here reprinted.
Duluth, Minnesota April 11, 1902
Dear Mr. Powell:
With regret I must inform you of the death last autumn in my boardinghouse of Mr. Asa North, whom you asked about in your letter of the 2nd.
He was with us for two months only, and for much of that time was in a "bad way" physically, unable to eat anything more substantial than the weakest beef and inclined to regurgitate the merest scrap of meat which found its way through the sieve, with results most painful and piteous. He was visited twice by our family doctor, who following his second examination pronounced the patient to be suffering from carcinoma of the colon, a disease which he explained is incurable except by surgery, and then only in its earliest stages, after which it is always fatal. He advised me to make Mr. North's last days as comfortable as possible and said that when the time came he would make the necessary arrangements through his office.
Mr. North was in much pain throughout the last week. At length he fell into delirium, during which it was necessary to board my two children at the neighbor's to prevent exposing them to the foul language into which he was disposed to burst at any moment without warning. During the last three days he would eat nothing. Early on the morning of the last day the household was aroused by a long, screeching bellow issuing from his room, at which time I hastened in to find him clutching the brass bedposts behind his head in both fists, back arched, eyes wide and staring, his nostrils distended and his teeth bared in a hideous grimace. Whereupon he lapsed into a coma and did not regain consciousness. He expired at 4:08 p.m.
He was buried in the neighborhood churchyard, but since no one knew his birthdate (he appeared to be in his early fifties) only his name and the date of his death (October 26) were inscribed upon the stone. Both the stone and the burial were paid for out of funds in his possession at the time of his death. What remained went toward recompensing me for his care.
You mentioned in your letter that Mr. North had been a "wolfer," and a number of comments he let slip in his delirium would seem to confirm this, but such was not his occupation when he came to live beneath my roof as at that time he owned neither horse nor weapon.
Respectfully,
Nora Crain Carmichael
At the bottom of the last page of the letter was a short note written in a flowery hand made deliberate with age.
As I am certain that she was unaware of my existence, I never corresponded with Mrs. Carmichael. Had I done so, I would have felt obliged to explain to her that Asa North's last utterance was not, as she described it, a "bellow," but rather a howl.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The massive campaign to exterminate the Great Plains wolf is a fascinating and appalling chapter in the history of the West that has received short shrift in modern retrospectives and almost no notice at all in literature. Prompted by man's primitive hatred and fear of a fellow predator, it rivaled the wholesale slaughter that swept the bison to near-extinction, and yet few people today are even aware that it took place. Because of this the problem of obtaining research material on the subject was a towering one.
The author is grateful to a number of persons and institutions for providing him with excerpts from obscure texts and newspaper articles of the period. The former included typewritten transcriptions of eyewitness testimony volunteered by aging wolfers, many of which have never been published and might long since have gone the way of all paper but for these unsung guardians of posterity: Jim Davis, Librarian, Idaho State Historical Society, Boise; Philip J. Roberts, Research
Historian, Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department, Cheyenne; Constance M. Soja, Research Assistant, Oregon Historical Society, Portland; and the staff of the Montana Historical Society, Helena.
Without their dedication and assistance The Wolfer would still be a maddening itch at the base of the author's occipital lobe.
For those who would seek further information on the subjects of wolf hunting and the creatures themselves, the following nonfiction works are highly recommended: Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat (Little, Brown & Co., Boston, Toronto, 1963); The Wolf by L. David Mech (Graphic Arts Division, the American Museum of Natural History, Garden City, New York, 1970); Of Wolves and Men by Barry Hoistun Lopez (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1978); The Wolf in North American History by Stanley Young (The Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho, 1946); and The Cult of the Wild by Boyce Rensberger (Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1977), pp. 48-81.
But for the above-mentioned works, whose main focus is quite rightly on the animals rather than their pursuers, almost the only modem mention of the Great Butchery is to be found in books dealing with the wolves' brothers in disaster, the bison or American buffalo. No evening is wasted if it is spent with these excellent and highly readable histories: The Buffalo Book by David A. Dary (The Swallow Press, Chicago, 1974); The Hunting of the Buffalo by E. Douglas Branch (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1962); The Buffalo by Francis Haines (Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York, 1975); and The Great Buffalo Hunt by Wayne Gard (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1968).
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