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Authors: Peter Steinhart
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remained about the same.”
In the East, predator controls combined with alteration of habitat and elimination of deer to cause the extinction of the wolf by the early part of the century. In the West, the land wasn’t cleared for farms, and extinction took longer.
Before the coming of the railroads, western ranching coexisted with wolves. The West was arid land and could not support cattle in concentrated pastures typical of the eastern states and Europe. A rancher in the West turned large numbers of cows loose on the open range, and left them unattended until roundup. Mexican ranchers turned wild longhorn cattle onto the range, and they probably held their own against wolves, because they were aggressive and stood their ground against wolf attacks.
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 acowhand 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
In the East, predator controls combined with alteration of habitat and elimination of deer to cause the extinction of the wolf by the early part of the century. In the West, the land wasn’t cleared for farms, and extinction took longer.
Before the coming of the railroads, western ranching coexisted with wolves. The West was arid land and could not support cattle in concentrated pastures typical of the eastern states and Europe. A rancher in the West turned large numbers of cows loose on the open range, and left them unattended until roundup. Mexican ranchers turned wild longhorn cattle onto the range, and they probably held their own against wolves, because they were aggressive and stood their ground against wolf attacks.
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 acowhand 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
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