by Barry Lopez
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 The animal was virtually wiped out, and in 1933 the bounty law in Montana was repealed.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 provid
ing 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 crimina
l 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.
