Wolves

“The wolves in Carolina are very numerous, and more destructive than [other] animal[s],” wrote naturalist Mark Catesby in 1743. “They go in droves by night, and hunt deer like hounds, with dismal yelling cries.” This was the Algonquin park wolf, Canis lupus lycaon (sometimes called the eastern wolf and thought by many modern taxonomists to be related to the red wolf), a canid that once inhabited the broadest range of any North American subspecies. When the first Europeans arrived the range of the Algonquin wolf stretched from Hudson Bay south along the eastern seaboard to Florida and west as far as eastern Minnesota, where it likely intermixed with another subspecies, the Minnesota wolf (Canis lupus nubilus). Today the Algonquin wolf remains confined to parts of Ontario, Quebec, and possibly northern Minnesota (although taxonomists debate the status of these wolves). Morphological and physiological measurements of extant skull specimens from the eastern seaboard demonstrate that it, like the red wolf, was smaller than most other North American subspecies.

With its “dismal yelling cries” echoing in the North American wilderness, the very wilderness that European colonists sought to transform into cultivated farmland, it should not be surprising that these settlers had essentially exterminated the wolf in the East by the 19th century. In England, homeland of many colonists, wolves had been hunted to extinction nearly a century earlier, during the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509). In Scotland wolves survived until 1743, while in Ireland populations of the animal lasted until the 1770s. In North America part of the motivation for exterminating wolves was economic. In 1610 Virginia colonists brought cattle from the West Indies, while other settlers raised sheep. Legislation against killing livestock in the early years sought to ensure that the animals proliferated, but “sheep for a few years suffered greatly from the ravages of wolves,” wrote one observer, and stock never reached anticipated numbers. A 1638 letter by colonist Edmund Browne succinctly explained, “Our greatest enemies are our wolves.”

Colonists reacted swiftly and relentlessly against “marauding companies” of wolves. Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, offered bounties to colonists for dead wolves throughout the 1630s and 1640s; in exchange for a severed wolf head (which constables later buried after cutting off its ears and tongue), Native Americans received corn and wine. In May 1645 Massachusetts Bay colonists formed a committee to “consider. . . the best ways and means to destroy the wolves which are such ravenous cruel creatures.” Three years later Boston bought dogs “for the destruction of wolves.” Similar legislation appeared in the New Plymouth and Virginia colonies, where Native Americans brought in wolf heads as tribute to their new colonial masters. In 1640 Rhode Island witnessed the birth of professional wolf hunters whom they paid “thirty shillings a head for every one killed.” Roger Williams led a “grand hunt” to “extirpate” the wolves of Rhode Island, but he met with limited success as wolves “continued to be a source of annoyance.”

The threat of wolves in North America was more than economic, however. Eighteenth-century theologian Cotton Mather preached to colonists that they needed to turn America’s “howling wilderness” into a “fruitful field.” Similarly, in 1756 John Adams wrote that once the “whole [North American] continent [had been] one of continued dismal wilderness, the haunt of wolves and bears and more savage men,” but after the tilling and killing of this wilderness it had been made the “magnificent habitations of rational and civilized people.” Religious Pilgrims to the New World often viewed the wilderness as a place without God, and wolves, symbolic of such wilderness, were targeted as animals that needed to be extirpated. In this sense, wolf killing should be understood as part of the “errand into the wilderness.” This need to extirpate wolves, moreover, later became part of the migration of white settlers into the American West, where they hunted wolves to near extinction.

Further reading: Rick McIntyre, ed., War against the Wolf: America's Campaign to Extermi-nate the Wolf (Stillwater, Minn.: Voyageur Press, 1995).

—Brett L. Walker