A GORP Content Partner
Adapted from
Montana
Campfire Tales
by Dave Walter
Montana's
Wolf Wars
Part I
Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
Aldo Leopold might have been speaking directly to Montanans when he reflected on man's relationship with the wolf. For this issue has remained hotly partisan and intensely volatile—beginning with the earliest confrontation between Montana stockmen and the wolf in the 1880s. Finally, during the Great Depression, a ranchers' decade-long campaign eliminated the wolf from the Montana landscape. Now, however, with the return of wolves to several areas of the state, the story of the wolf in Montana deserves a measured telling.
A gray wolf in Denali National Park
Notecard available from Kennan Ward.
Before the European settlement of North America, commencing in earnest in the seventeenth century, the gray wolf (Canis lupus) inhabited lands from coast to coast and from northern Canada to central Mexico. In fact, this wolf enjoyed the widest distribution of any land mammal, a testament to his ability to adapt to diverse environments. One subspecies proved most prevalent across Montana: Canis lupus nubilus. Estimates of wolf population in Montana in 1800 run as high as 200,000 animals. Biologists currently figure the number at fewer than 100.
The adult Montana wolf stands 30 to 38 inches high, weighs between 80 and 125 pounds, and stretches from 5 to 6 feet long, including the tail. He can live more than thirteen years, although most do not reach five years of age. At a full run, a wolf can hit 40 miles per hour, but he maintains a more normal, slow trot of 5 miles per hour in open country for hours on end. As a result, a wolf can cover as much as 100 miles per day—though a more normal day course, in search of food, covers 20 miles. A wolf's regular hunting foray often comprises a 60-mile circle.
The wolf is a carnivore, who kills to eat, so the availability of food dictates his hunting region. He accepts a lifetime mate, but if that companion dies, he will breed with another. Together the pair raises a series of litters, each of which can number six or eight pups or more.
The tendency of wolves to form a pack results from both the family's social organization and the size of its prey. For example, a pack of twenty wolves may form to stalk a bison or a moose, but that number is excessive when hunting ground squirrels. In hunting wild game, the wolf most often selects young, aged, or weak victims, because the kill is easier.
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Wolves in the Wild photo gallery by acclaimed artist Kennan WardWhen the Lewis and Clark expedition crossed Montana in 1805 and 1806, its members encountered numerous wolves. They found them particularly on the plains, feeding on bison, but also in the wooded mountains. To these explorers, familiar with Eastern and Midwestern wolves, the Montana wolves proved more bothersome than remarkable. Journal entries addressing wolves lack the captains' usual descriptive detail.
A minor exception occurred for William Clark, moving down the lower Yellowstone River valley in early August 1806. He remarked:
Saw emence numbers of Elk Buffalow and wolves to day. the wolves do catch the elk. I saw 2 wolves in pursute of a doe Elk which I beleive they Cought. they were very near her when She entered a Small wood in which I expect they cought her, as She did not pass out of the small wood during my remaining in view of it, which was 15 or 20 minits &c.Hard on the heels of the Lewis and Clark expedition arrived the fur trappers, descending from the north and ascending the Missouri River from the southeast. Until 1840, however, the fur industry relied on the beaver trade. So mountain men ignored the wolf pelt, an unprofitable commodity. In fact, trappers perceived the wolf primarily in the role of spoiler: the raider of animals from their trap sets and the scavenger of food from their supply caches.
About 1850, however, the fur trade shifted its emphasis from beaver to buffalo hides, wolf pelts, and deer skins. As long as the bison herds lasted (into the early 1880s), the buffalo hide dominated this skin trade. Nevertheless mackinaws and steamboats consistently freighted wolf pelts down the Missouri River to St. Louis. The American Fur Company shipped only twenty wolf pelts from Fort Benton in 1850, but by 1853 that number had risen to more than three thousand. During the mid-1860s, wolf pelts annually ran between five and ten thousand, collected from Company posts along the Missouri.
Gray Wolf Profile
Notecard available from Kennan Ward.
The abundance of wolves in Montana between 1860 and 1885 spawned an occupation peculiar to the Great Plains: the "wolfer." As long as a market remained for wolf pelts, men who worked seasonally on the steamboats, or in freighting or mining, resorted to "wolfing" during the winter, when the wolf pelt became prime. Such entrepreneurs needed a stake of only $150 to purchase a season's worth of staples and large supplies of ammunition and strychnine. With hard work, a man could gross as much as $2,000 by selling the wolf pelts at Fort Benton in the spring, for about $2.50 each.
The wolfer developed a relatively straightforward technique. He shot bison, at about five-mile intervals, in a circular pattern. He then implanted each carcass with strychnine, usually in crystalline-sulfate form, and proceeded down the line. Wolves trotted in to eat the fresh kill and were poisoned, dropping within yards of the carcass. On occasion, a single bait station could kill several dozen wolves. The wolfer continued to ride his circuit, skinning dead wolves and setting new poisoned carcasses. Observers have estimated that wolfers annually harvested more than 55,000 wolves between 1870 and 1877. The American Fur Company's cargo figures for its Missouri River posts during the 1870s reflect this estimate.
By the early 1880s, several outside forces changed the role played by the wolf on the Montana plains. First, wolfers had killed so many animals that wolfing became only marginally profitable, and many men abandoned the trade. Second, buffalo hunters rapidly were depleting the large bison herds on the plains. The last productive bison-hunting season in the Yellowstone Valley was 1881-1882; by 1884 only small groups of bison could be found scattered on the Montana prairies. As a result, the two parties most dependent on the bison—Native Americans and wolves—needed to adapt quickly to alternate food sources.
The third factor altering the wolf's role involved stockmen who, beginning in the 1870s, pushed small herds of domestic cattle from sheltered river valleys out onto public-domain prairies. These cattlemen had learned that range cattle could survive Montana winters by grazing on the nutritious native grasses. By the early 1880s, hundreds of cattle outfits were running massive herds on the plains that once had fed the bison.
Had experience with wolves? Share your thoughts in the Outdoor Ethics forum. The Montana plains wolf of the early 1880s faced no real choice in this situation. He could starve to death or change his diet from bison to cattle. This switch placed the wolf in direct conflict with Montana stockgrowers. For the next fifty years, the history of the Montana wolf comprises the story of the livestock industry's highly successful campaign to eliminate the wolf from the state.
The wolf long has preyed on domesticated cattle. The pattern developed in Europe even before it began in North America—wherever settlers brought cattle into the wolf's traditional habitat. Plymouth Colony placed the first American bounty on the wolf in 1630.
However, the open-range cattleman of the 1880s, using Montana's free grasses, faced an even greater threat from the wolf. For this stockman was not protecting a few milk cows around his log cabin, he was casting thousands of head across an unfenced landscape. He infrequently saw his cattle, and he held little control over their daily safety. This cattleman could sustain a substantial loss as a result of weather, theft, and predators. Yet, economically, he could not permit the large numbers of wolves roaming the Montana prairies to feast uncontested on his herds.
The open-range cattleman, working in a highly speculative industry, found in the wolf a convenient scapegoat for several of his problems. In addition the stockman cultivated a real hatred for the wolf, based on actions he believed demonstrated the animal's cowardice.
Go to Montana's Wolf Wars, part II.
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