Wolf Wars Come to America
While we may have had a mutually beneficial partnership with wolves thousands of years ago, that partnership unraveled once our ancestors claimed land and raised livestock. Instead of partners, wolves became competition to be eradicated. Colonists brought this anti-wolf attitude to America.
Before colonists arrived, as many as two million wolves roamed North America and northern Mexico, according to respected naturalist, Ernest Seton. But by 1970 only 700 or so wolves remained in the Lower 48.
Wolves were quickly eradicated east of the Mississippi.
Even though most colonists had never even seen or heard wolves, had never lost livestock to wolves, they stepped off the boats into the New World ready and willing to kill wolves.
Colonists rapidly eradicated wolves east of the Mississippi. In 1630 the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the first wolf bounty. In 1632 Virginia followed suit. In 1697 a New Jersey law established payment for wolf carcasses. As wolf killing ramped up, wolves disappeared from Massachusetts by 1840, Ohio by 1850, Illinois by 1860, West Virginia by 1887, Pennsylvania by 1892, and from New York and Kentucky by the late 1800s.
Settlers encroached on wolf territory west of the Mississippi.
As wolves disappeared “back east,” plenty of wolves still lived and hunted on the Great Plains. Scientists using a DNA technique have calculated that 380,000 wolves roamed the western United States and Mexico prior to the late 1800s and early 1900s. These wolves found themselves in harm’s way as settlers migrated west.
Two events helped spur that westward migration, according to Richard Slatta, Professor of History at North Carolina State University. The US victory in the Mexican War which ended in 1848 opened up vast acreage of western land. The 1849 California gold rush drew hordes of fortune hunters.
By 1854 the first homesteaders began to settle on the Great Plains. The 1862 Homestead Act made claiming land relatively easy. Anyone willing to settle in the West got 160 acres of free land if they built a home and farmed that land for five years. After the Civil War ended, western farming boomed. Homesteaders swarmed to the Great Plains from 1870 to 1890.
The 1874 invention of barbed wire helped all the ranchers enclose large areas of land for their livestock. Around the same time more land became available for fencing and ranching as Native Americans were forced onto reservations. The cattle industry grew as railroads provided refrigerated and relatively inexpensive transportation of beef to distant consumers.
By 1890, so much of the West had been covered with a patchwork of towns, farms, ranches, barbed wire, and livestock that the US Census Bureau declared that the once wide-open western frontier no longer existed.
Settlers eliminated wolves’ natural prey.
Of course, with farms, ranches, and towns springing up in wolf country, conflict was inevitable as settlers hungry for wild meat and for land to graze their livestock upon killed the natural prey of wolves.
The killing of bison provides a clear—and tragic—example. Perhaps 30 million bison once grazed between the Atlantic coast and the Rockies. And gray wolves—once found in 41 of the lower 48 states—followed the huge herds. Bison were so accustomed to seeing wolves that Native American hunters wore wolf pelts as disguises so they could close in on bison.
Bison were eradicated by settlers from Virginia by 1730. By the 1770s, bison had vanished from most or all of the Carolinas, Alabama, and Florida. By 1808 they had vanished from Ohio; by 1830 from Indiana; and by 1832 from Wisconsin. In just one hundred years bison had been eradicated east of the Mississippi. Next, most of the millions that remained on the Great Plains were killed to make bison robes, feed railroad workers, and fuel an industrial revolution. They were also killed for sport and as a means of controlling Native Americans.
By 1884 only 325 wild bison survived in the Lower 48. This included two dozen hiding deep within Yellowstone National Park where hunting was not allowed.
The populations of other wolf prey—elk, deer, and pronghorn—that ranchers saw as competitors for precious grass also declined. As wildlife were eaten or chased off, cattle and sheep moved in. Wolves—hungry and deprived of their natural prey—took livestock. And paid with their lives.
Wolves were killed for pelts and bounties.
In the 1800s, the market for wolf hides boomed as beavers—trapped to make felt hats—neared extinction. Historians Lee Whittlesey and Paul Schullery refer to an 1873 article in Helena, Montana’s, The Daily Herald reporting that a group of wolfers [professional wolf hunters] accumulated about 10,000 wolf hides during one winter.
Meanwhile, wolves killed some cattle and sheep that ranchers ran in wolf country. Ranchers complained and state governments responded by instituting bounties on wolves—just as colonists had 200 years earlier. In 1838 Michigan instituted a bounty as did Minnesota in 1849, Iowa in 1858, Wisconsin in 1865, Colorado in 1869, Wyoming in 1875, and Montana in 1883.
Whittlesey and Schullery found records that show bounties paid on 80,000 wolves from 1883 to 1918 in Montana and on 30,000 wolves in Wyoming from 1895 to 1917. They caution that these numbers may be overstated because “bounty hunters were creative and energetic in defrauding authorities.” They reference another historian who estimated that the number of wolves killed during the 1860s and 1870s was unknown but a “conservative estimate would be more than 100,000 per year between 1870 and 1877.” That’s at least 700,000 wolves.
This slaughter took various forms. Wolves were hunted with dogs, shot, trapped, and dug from their dens. Wolf packs died after eating poisoned carcasses left for them. And wolves didn’t fight back. Their natural intelligence, speed, strength, and teeth were no match for our big brains and big arsenals.
Wolves Became Feared and Hated in Literature.
But physically eliminating wolves was not enough. Even as wolves disappeared from the countryside, we kept wolves alive, feared, and hated in literature, especially in children's stories. Take Grimm's Fairy Tales, for example. When published in 1812, though wolves were almost eradicated in Germany by then, that book contained "Little Red Riding Hood," with its infamous wolf.
Around the same time, Europeans—on a continent almost devoid of wolves—resurrected two thousand-year-old Aesop's Fables. Those stories contained "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," with its wolf destroying the flock of a lying boy, and “The Dog and the Wolf," with a wolf refusing to give up its freedom to become a collared, well-fed pet.
In 1886—more than three hundred years after the wolf was eradicated in England—“The Three Little Pigs" was published in The Nursery Rhymes of England. In that tale, a wolf with an insatiable appetite manages to eat two of the pigs before the third kills and eats him.
Stories such as these—filled with anti-wolf propaganda—taught new generations to fear and hate wolves that didn't even exist.
The US Government Institutionalized Wolf Killing.
Anti-wolf propaganda was institutionalized in the US by our government’s wolf-killers. This process began in 1885, when a three-person unit, the Section of Economic Ornithology (SEO), was created in the US Department of Agriculture to gather and analyze information on bird migrations. But the SEO’s job quickly changed as livestock interests throughout the West lobbied against paying grazing fees on public lands populated with wolves and coyotes.
The federal government moved to protect its income from grazing fees at the cost of wildlife, and in 1905, the SEO became the Bureau of Biological Survey. The newly named agency investigated predator-livestock conflicts and produced publications that described how to shoot, trap, and poison wolves. The agency helped develop the practice of taking wolf pups in the den.
By the early 1920s, predator and rodent control became the main job of the Bureau of Biological Survey and this paid well. For many years the financial support received from western states and livestock associations exceeded monies appropriated by Congress for the Survey’s budget, according to a Texas Tech University paper. (This unit would continue to grow, become charged with killing predators and other wildlife, and in 1997 would be named Wildlife Services—our nation’s secretive and out-of-control wolf killers.)
Between 1916 and 1926 even the National Park Service joined in the killing with a predator control program that resulted in the extermination of wolves from Yellowstone National Park by 1926 or possibly earlier.
In addition to the killing by the federal government, wolf hunts peaked in the 1920s and1930s, with up to 21,000 wolves killed by hunters every year.
With all this killing, wolves disappeared from Missouri by the late 1800s, from Kansas by the early 1900s, from Nebraska by 1913, from Iowa by 1925, and from Colorado by 1941.
By 1970 only 700 of the once two million wolves remained in the Lower 48. Those wolves were hiding in the woods of northern Minnesota and on Isle Royale.
What lessons can we take from our wolf-human history?
How does the past relate to the future of wolves in the Lower 48? That’s the subject of the fourth and final part in this series.
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Photo Credits:
Wolf pair by Isle Royale National Park
Bison and wolf by Rick Lamplugh
Little Red Riding Hood public domain
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