JUST AS RICK MCINTYRE DOCUMENTED IN HIS OUTSTANDING 1995 BOOK "WAR AGAINST THE WOLF: AMERICA'S CAMPAIGN TO EXTERMINATE THE WOLF(VOYAGEUR BOOKS), PAUL BARCLAY, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT LAFAYETTE COLLEGE WRITES ELOQUENTLY ON HOW THE WOLF WAS EXTIRPATED EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI BY 1800.....ELK GONE, BISON GONE, MOOSE GONE, WHITETAILS GONE.............FOREST RAZED.................AND FINALLY THE COUGAR AND WOLF GO BY THE WAYSIDE IN THE NAME OF PASTORAL BLISS

READ MY EDITING OF THE ARTICLE BELOW OR CLICK HERE TO READ A COPIED VERSION(FULL ARTICLE)

A 'Curious and Grim Testimony to a Persistent Human

Blindness': Wolf Bounties in North America, 1630–1752

PAUL D. BARCLAY

 19 February 2002

To colonial legislators, uniform, colony-wide wolf bounties, as incentives to wolf-extermination,

seemed the simplest solution to a perceived threat to livestock and European

settlements. To local taxpayers, considerations of parsimony and fraud loomed just as

large. This tension led to wolf extermination policies that were costly and often

counterproductive. The bounty laws, as enacted, amounted to a fanatical fight against the abstract

wolf, instead of against individual predators. Its eventual 'success' brought about new

troubles. Absent wolves, the eastern seaboard's ecosystem re-adjusted, allowing new

predators and pests to flourish.

In 1700, the Chester County, Pennsylvania, treasurer paid out 20 pounds to bounty

hunters for the heads of 32 wolves, for 27% of the county's annual levy. This

expenditure was not unusual—wolf bounties frequently comprised 10–20% of colonial

North American county and town budgets (see Table 1 for examples). Because wolves

were linked to the destruction of calves and sheep, wolf extermination seemed a

prerequisite for settled life. After all, livestock was a key sector in the colonial

economy.

 But while thepolicy of extermination seems straightforward enough, its actual implementation was

politically complicated. Colonies drafted the bounties, but local governments

raised most or all of the money and monitored bounty redemptions. Though leaders of

these rural communities surely understood that wolves did not heed human political

boundaries, payments for wolves killed outside the local tax base were scrupulously

avoided. Because this 'only in my backyard' policy created a thicket of ancillary statutes

and procedural tangles, making the policy extremely inefficient, one can only surmise

that the men who drafted these laws feared the wrath of taxpayers unwilling to pay for

wolf extermination in neighboring towns or counties.

Evidence taken from county tax records, a source hitherto unexploited in the study of

wolf bounties, indicates that only a small fraction of settlers were inclined or skilled

enough to seek out and kill the wolf, and it took state intervention to make it worth their

while.

Though calls for extermination and the statutes themselves portrayed the generic wolf assavage and threatening, records of individual encounters reveal that North Americanwolves were quite timid and afraid of human beings.

 In Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1621,two wolves began chasing John Goodman's dog, driving it between his legs for safety.After eeing from a hurled stick, the wolves returned, only to be chased off for good

with a 'paleboad' (Young, 1864, p. 178). Thomas Morton of Merry Mount fame, writing

in the 1630s, atly stated that the wolves were 'fearefull Curres, and will runne away

from a man … as fast as any fearfull dogge' (Adams, 1883, p. 208). William Wood, a

contemporary of Morton's, wrote: 'the Woolves bee in some respect different from them

of other countries: it was never knowne yet that a woolfe ever set upon a man or woman.

Neyther do they trouble horses or cowes.' But, because they were known to eat red

calves, swine and goats, Wood judged wolves to 'be the greatest inconveniency the

Countrey hath' (Wood, 1968, pp. 23–24). Edward Johnson, also in 1630s Massachusetts,

wrote of wolves being 'feared away [by humans] before they have made an end of their

meale' (Johnson, 1867, p. 84). John Josselyn adds that North American wolves were 'not

bloodthirsty. 

 A half-centurylater (1728), William Byrd described Virginia wolves as 'not so large and fierce as they

are in other countries more Northerly. He will not attack a Man in the keenest of his

Hunger, but run away from him… The foxes are much bolder' (Byrd, 1984, p. 94). A

Moravian chronicler in North Carolina (1752) concurred: 'They are not like the wolves

of Germany, Poland, and Livonia, but are afraid of men, and do not usually approach

near them' (Fries, 1922, p. 52).

These timid and 'fearful curs', to whom the colonists attributed so much livestock

damage, were apparently dif. cult to locate. On 11 October 1631, John Winthrop armed

himself for an evening's walk 'supposing he might see a wolf'. He was unsuccessful.

Josselyn observed that wolves were 'so cunning, that seldome any are kill'd with guns

or traps'. To lure the fugitive predators, colonists dipped fur-covered mackerel hooks in

fat, leaving these lethal concoctions near carcasses (Josselyn, 1860, p. 150). Mannasseh

Minor, a selectman of Stonington, Connecticut, led bands of townsmen out to the

swamps to hunt wolves on 10 occasions between 1698 and 1714. Although his father and

some deputies killed six wolves on a trip in 1702, other hunts produced only one wolf killed.

 The colonies set bounties on bears, wildcats,catamounts, foxes, squirrels and even crows.

The presence of so many other predators, coupled with the lack of actual wolf sightings

in the documents, leads one to look beyond actual livestock damage to explain the

colonial mania to destroy wolves. In a number of the descriptions quoted above,

observed local wolves are contrasted with the reputedly more vicious wolves in far away

places (up north, in Europe or in Ireland). This rhetorical device made the behavior of

wolves irrelevant; considered abstractly, they were aggressive and dangerous. Though

infrequently sighted, wolves were a constant aural presence, magnifying their numbers

in the minds of immigrants.

The Salzburger journals (Georgia, 18th century) contain

numerous comments about the dreadful nocturnal howling of the wolves, as do the

Moravian accounts (colonial North Carolina). As a powerful religious icon, Christians

may have regarded the wolf, an emblem of danger to Christ the Shepherd's fock, as

'creatures of the godless wilderness that the colonists … had a moral duty to subdue'

(Fogleman, 1989, p. 66). The disjuncture between observation and rhetoric in these

accounts supports William Cronon's contention that folklore and night jitters may have

caused the colonists to exaggerate the wolf's role in livestock predation (Cronon, 1983,

p. 200).

Town fathers considered wolves a threat to game as well as to livestock. Anything

hunted by wolves near white settlements was an affront to settlers. The solution: 'kill

them all!'

 In 1629, to promote his plantation to Englishmen back home, John Winthrop

boasted of the 'Deare, which if they were preserved form the spoyle of Wolves (which

is not impossible) would soone abound there more' (Winthrop Family, 1931, 2: 146). Six

years later one of Winthrop's correspondents advised founders of new towns to clear

'rubbish waste grounds within the compass of the whole town' of wolves and 'noisome

beasts'. The plan was simple: 'First … deprive them of all their harbors, then … the

heades of soe many as shall come within our Compas, which may without greate

dif. culty be performed' (Winthrop, 1943, p. 184).

William Wood was less sanguine: despairing that though wolves 'be killed daily in

some place or other, either by the English, or Indian … yet is there little hope of their

utter destruction' (Wood, 1968, p. 24). In Virginia, the first wolf-bounty law (1632)

called for hunters to purge the area around the English settlement of all wildlife except

hogs, and to especially destroy wolves and vermin, for the purpose of ri e practice, and

to keep Indians away from the plantation (Hening, 1823, 1: 199).

 A century later (1736),the Georgia Salzburgers vowed that 'once the question of their land [had] been settledand made certain, they [would] join in making arrangements for the gradual extinction

of such harmful animals in our region for the greater safety of their livestock' (Jones,

1968, 3: 33–34). As for town life, 'all the bushes around the town would be cleared away

for the gardens that would be set out, so that they could not be a shelter for wolves,

foxes, raccoons, and other harmful beasts' (Jones, 1968, 15: 130).

Moravians in NorthCarolina also advocated wolf extermination, writing in 1752 that in 'the beginning wewill need a good, true, untiring, trustworthy forester and hunter, for the wolves and bears

must be exterminated if cattle raising is to succeed' (Fries, 1922, p. 60).

The extermination of wolves also allowed coyotes to extend their

range into New England, and they became, along with dogs, a new threat to livestock,

and still are to this day (Fogleman, 1989, p. 68).

Albert E. Cowdrey (1983, p. 49) has gone so far as to call anti-wolf legislation a

'curious and grim testimony to a persistent human blindness'. Cowdrey (1983, p. 49) has

asserted that the 'colonists themselves were spreading a feast before the carnivores, not

only in the form of living cattle, but in the carcasses of hundreds of thousands of deer',

setting off a wolf population explosion which took years of expensive bounty payments

to curb.

 A curious strategy employed by Rhode Island selectmen con. rms Cowdrey's

hypothesis. In 1646, a Portsmouth court ordered a two-month ban on deer hunting for

the purpose of baiting wolves who could then be 'catched for the general good of the

Island' (Bartlett, 1856, 1: 84). In 1772, a Virginia statute complained that hunters were

leaving deer carcasses in the wood, contributing to the increase in wolves. Inspectors

were designated to determine if deer-skin hunters were guilty of leaving these carcasses

out to bait the wolves (Hening, 1823, 8: 595).

By completely destroying the species, colonists caused undesirable (from a livestockmanagement perspective) changes in the ecosystem. Besides encouraging the growth ofother canine species, the destruction of wolves and foxes, along with their habitats, set 

off an increase in seed-eating animals like squirrels and crows by eliminating theirnatural predators (Silver, 1990, p. 111). Predictably, bounties were instituted to deal withthese newcomers. A series of treasurer's records from Chester County, Pennsylvania, and

the Pennsylvania Colonial Statutes give some empirical support to the idea that colonistsset off the chain-reactions described by Silver, Fogleman and Cowdrey (see Table 2).

Pennsylvania's colonial lawmakers instituted the first fox bounty in 1718 (Mitchell,

1896, 3: 178). During the 1720s, wolf and fox bounty totals run neck and neck, but after

1730, very few wolves appear to have been brought in. Unfortunately, the records for the

1730s and 1740s are not itemized except for 1747, so it impossible to tell how many of

each 'varmint' was killed for these years. In 1747 26 foxes were brought in, compared

to only one wolf. Bounties for crows began in 1724, and by 1747 their number equaled

the fox count (Mitchell, 1896, 4: 15).

 

Englishmen tried to pay Indians as little as possible for wolf bounties, but lawmakers in

Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New York all ended

up raising the price paid to Indians for wolves' heads at one time or another.

Indian/white wolf-bounty pay parity is one measure of the livestock damage Englishmen

attributed to wolves; lawmakers and their constituents hired Indians at equal pay only

when they felt that the situation called for desperate measures. The recurring adjustment

of bounties in the 17th and 18th centuries shows that Indians had considerable

bargaining power in their economic relations with whites in the 17th century. Except in

one case (Orange County, New York, 1715), slaves were offered the same bounties as

whites, even where Indians were given lower prices. Since wolf-bounty laws stipulated

that slaves' wolf bounties be remitted to their owners, this wrinkle in the law is

unsurprising.

 

An analysis of county court records from Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1699–1728, an

area that saw much wolf-bounty activity, suggests that the average settler was not

inclined to trap or hunt wolves. In the extant records for these three decades, 315 bounty

claims were made and 443 wolves were redeemed for an average of 1.4 wolves per

claim.(64) and killed a quarter of the wolves (108). Europeans with 121 different surnames

collected a total of 247 bounties and killed 329 wolves, for an average of about two

bounties and 1.33 wolves per bounty over a 30-year period. Thomas, Richard, Pheby and

William Buf. ngton claimed 21 bounties, over 10 times the average, and bagged 50

wolves, over 37 times the average. Jonathan and Henry Hays made 10 claims and killed

18 wolves; Thomas Evanson made nine claims, killing 15 wolves. All told, the top 10

surnames made 85, or 34.4%, of all European claims in Chester County. The 111

remaining surnames collected 166 bounties, or only half of all claims. In short, over a

30-year period, the vast majority of European wolf-killers in Chester County made one

trip to the country seat to redeem a single wolf scalp. That half the bounties were

claimed by a few families and foreign mercenaries indicates that most settlers did not

think wolf extermination an urgent affair.