Mt. Heyburn in central Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountain wilderness. Photo by Charles Knowles, and used under a Creative Commons license.

In 1980, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published the Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan, which provided a detailed plan for researching, reestablishing, and maintaining wolves in two portions of the wolves’ historic range: Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho. The FWS’s eventual goal was to return the wolf to a population of 30 breeding pairs for three successive years in three designated areas of  Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Once that milestone had been reached, the report recommended turning management over to the states.

The 1980 report framed the need for federal action and oversight in the context of recent decades’ advances in civil rights protections and legislation:

Independent research on controversial subjects always necessitates stringent safeguards: in this case the very minimal act of separating the lead agency from local politics and prejudices.

To adequately grasp the importance of assigning the lead role in most tasks to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, one should compare the management of endangered species to civil rights legislation and administrative actions. In both cases the long tradition of states rights has been broken by federal legislation designed to protect minorities poorly treated by the majority.  With regard to endangered species, there may be two minorities: the animals and the humans who advocate their preservation and restoration. Vigorous and lengthy federal civil rights action—by the judiciary, the Congress, and the executive—was required to force state compliance with national goals of the American people. Voluntary action by individual states was limited. The national will, as expressed in the Endangered Species Act, has occasionally forced state and local concerns to be subordinated to larger issues. . . .

The conclusion of this analysis is clear: there is an unmistakable mandate for federal action to implement a Recovery Plan that would otherwise languish under state inaction or biased performance. Again, it bears repeating: the objectively predictable outcome of allowing state assumption of major recovery tasks will be the partial if not complete failure of the plan to accomplish its objective.” (61-62)

From our perspective in the second decade of the twenty-first century, such an application of civil rights legislation designed to protect people of color, and African-Americans in particular, may strike us as a remote and theoretical application of legal precedent, but recall that in 1980, the Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was still relatively new legislation—it was but 16 years old. People still bore the physical and emotional scars of the civil rights movement. Those who bothered to read the report likely had an emotional or even visceral reaction to the report’s author’s invocation of civil rights law in the context of wolf protection and recovery. It was, in short, a new call to arms for progressives who might have been casting about for their next cause.

 

The cover of the 1987 recovery plan

In 1987, the FWS raised its investment in wolves significantly when it updated its 1980 Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan. The plan called for the establishment of ten breeding pairs, and total of at least 100 wolves, in three core recovery areas—including central Idaho.  The report estimated that in 1987, Idaho supported a population of no more than 15 wolves, none of them paired.

 

Little Redfish Lake in central Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. Photo by Charles Knowles, and used under a Creative Commons license.

A map from the 1987 plan

 The 1987 plan drew on field observations and research on wolf prey and habitat.  In determining the best place to relocate breeding pairs of wolves, the report’s authors maintained that

 Ungulates comprise the major component of wolf diet throughout central Idaho. Elk, mule deer, white-tailed deer, and moose were available, are the primary prey species. Columbian ground squirrels, snowshoe hare, and grouse are available to wolves in central Idaho as an alternate prey source. Beaver, an important alternate prey source for wolves in some areas of North America, are scarce over most of central Idaho.

Idaho National Forests in the north-central (Clearwater, Nez Perce, Bitterroot), and west-central (Payette, Boise) part of the Central Idaho Area support more natural prey-biomass per wolf than do other forests (challis, Sawtooth, Salmon) at this time, and thus would probably support more wolves with fewer conflicts. Also, fewer livestock are grazed on north and west-central forests within or near the Central Idaho Area resulting in less potential for livestock conflicts in key areas.

The plan listed three objectives:

Primary Objective: To remove the Northern Rocky Mountain wolf from the endangered and threatened species list by securing and maintaining a minimum of ten breeding pairs in each of the three recovery areas for a minimum of three successive years.

Secondary Objective: To reclassify the Northern Rocky Mountain wolf to threatened status over its entire range by securing and maintaining a minimum of ten breeding pairs in each of two recovery areas for a minimum of three successive years.

Tertiary Objective: To reclassify the Northern Rocky Mountain wolf to threatened status in an individual recovery area by securing and maintaining a minimum of ten breeding pairs in the recovery area for a minimum of three successive years. Consideration will also be given to reclassifying such a population to threatened under similarity of appearance after the tertiary objective for the population has been achieved and verified, special regulations are established, and a State management plan is in place for that population.

The conclusions drawn by these reports seem straightforward: Ethically and legally, it was the federal government’s responsibility to ensure wolves received the protection and assistance they needed to thrive, and Idaho was an ideal place for the reintroduction of wolves.

Idahoans, however, were not persuaded wolf reintroduction was the best idea.

Continue to Wolves, Part V: Resistance and negotiation (Coming soon!)

A radio-collared wolf watches biologists in Yellowstone National Park. Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Outside of fairy tales and folklore, humans have been alternately coexisting and clashing with wolves for millenia.  As we have seen, Native peoples had developed a mythology around Canis lupus (the gray wolf) and Canis rufus (the red wolf). Soon after arriving on the eastern shores of North America, European Americans began to document their own experiences with the continent’s wolves.  Some colonies were efficient in dealing with an animal their inhabitants saw as a menace, while others had less success in their eradication efforts. Jon Coleman reports in his book Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, colonists had exterminated coastal Boston’s wolves by 1657, while other colonists in Massachusetts were still dealing with wolves in the middle of the eighteenth century.  These were not humane deaths.  Coleman explains,

Examples of ugliness toward wolves stained every period of American history. It marked John Josselyn in the seventeenth century as well as the sport hunters who shot wolves from Piper Cubs buzzing low over Alaskan snowfields in the 1950s. Euro-Americans fractured wolf skulls and shotgunned wolf puppies.  They set the animals on fire and dragged them to pieces behind horses. They destroyed wolves for a host of pragmatic reasons: to safeguard livestock, to knit local ecosystems into global capitalist markets, to collect state-sponsored bounties, and to rid the world of beasts they considered evil, wild, corrupt, and uplicitous.  Their motives appear as blunt as a gunshot to the head, but wolves’ deaths were neither that quick nor that straightforward. They died with fractured spines and severed hamstrings, gifts from a predator dissatisfied with mere annihilation. (71)

Migrants on the overland trail to Idaho and other western parts also encountered wolves. With the buffalo on the decline from overhunting by European Americans, the wolves found the pioneers’ oxen and cattle—weakened from hard travel and a shortage of food and water—to be easy prey.  That was hard enough for the migrants to handle.  When, however, wolves began digging up the shallow graves of migrants who died along the trail, the Latter Day Saints who would settle Utah and Idaho declared an all-out war.  Coleman [points out that] the State of Deseret—later Utah—issued bounties for wolves in 1850, and in 1851 Utah’s wolf bounty payments were exceeded by only one other item in the new U.S. territory: wars with Native Americans. “Mormon bounty hunters,” Coleman writes, “were so deadly they nearly bankrupted the territory.”

The slaughter of wolves and other canids—coyotes were also a favored target, especially when their populations increased with the decline in wolves—continued apace through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as ranchers in particular sought to protect their herds from predation.  Wolves retreated north, to the cold of Minnesota, Michigan, Canada, and Alaska.

Even President Theodore Roosevelt engaged in wolf hunting.  In this photograph from Oklahoma in 1905, he stands behind a John Abernathy, who holds a dead wolf by its jaw. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

A change of heart and mind

Wolf pups from the Wenaha pack, in Oregon in 2012. The Wenaha pack formed when a small wolf pack crossed into northeast Oregon in 2008 from Idaho. Image courtesy of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, many Americans began to reconsider their relationship with wolves.  Wolves came in part to represent the romance of the desert, mountains, and frontier, the untamed nature of the American wilderness.  Increasingly, too, environmentalists and others offered scientific arguments for the presence of the wolf in the American landscape. They argued that, as an apex predator, the wolf served an important role in regulating herbivores and, by controlling herbivore populations, restoring a balance to the ecosystem’s plants and other animals.

In 1966, Congress passed the Endangered Species Protection Act, which asked the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Defense to protect endangered species, in part by preserving their habitat.  In 1967, wolves were added to the list of endangered species, which offered them limited protection.

In 1973, Congress passed the more robust Endangered Species Act.  In its summary of the act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service explains that the act:

•  authorizes the determination and listing of species as endangered and threatened;
• prohibits unauthorized taking, possession, sale, and transport of endangered species;
• provides authority to acquire land for the conservation of listed species, using land and water conservation funds;
• authorizes establishment of cooperative agreements and grants-in-aid to States that establish and maintain active and adequate programs for endangered and threatened wildlife and plants;
• authorizes the assessment of civil and criminal penalties for violating the Act or regulations; and
• authorizes the payment of rewards to anyone furnishing information leading to arrest and conviction for any violation of the Act or any regulation issued thereunder.

In 1974, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) added four subspecies of the gray wolf to the list of endangered and threatened wildlife, and in 1978 listed the entire species of Canis lupus, thereby protecting all gray wolves in the lower 48 states under the Endangered Species Act.

Only two years later, the FWS published a comprehensive plan for wolf recovery—a huge step toward reintroduction of the wolf into the American West.

Continue to Wolves, Part IV: The 1980 and 1987 Wolf Recovery Plans

Print sources used in this section

Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004): 71, 183.

Humans’ depictions of the wolf range from noble to fearsome. Which of the images on this page most resonate with you?

 

Image from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

 

Image by Charles Livingston Bull, courtesy of the Library of Congress

To understand attitudes toward the reintroduction of the wolf in Idaho, we need to first get a sense of how the wolf functions in the folklore of Idaho’s residents.

In recent years, photos of “giant wolves” shot “in Idaho” (and alternatively listed as Alberta, Manitoba, and Wyoming) have been circulated via e-mail, on Facebook, and elsewhere online.

 

Image source. (See other such images of hunters with dead wolves.)

 In some instances, the text accompanying the photos states,

It is amazing how big they are. Deer, elk, and livestock killing machines.  The big question you have to ask yourself is why? These massive wolves are not the native wolf that lived in our area 100 years ago. There was a reason these things where [sic] exterminated nationwide. They sure do look cuddly and cute.  I wonder if our city dwelling tree hugger society that never has left a city really understands the impact of these killing machines.

The speed with which these photos went viral, especially on websites catering to hunters or ranchers, suggests many Idahoans share these beliefs—and these photos are designed to recruit additional believers.  However, the wolves in the photos, while they might appear to be 200 to 225 pounds, weigh only about 80 to 100 pounds. The photos have not been manipulated in Photoshop or with similar software; rather, the camera lens and angle make the wolf appear much larger than it actually is.   The Idaho Department of Fish and Game has confirmed this photo is a hoax and the largest wolf ever captured in Idaho was 135 pounds.  The photos make clear that many people see the wolf as a literally larger-than-life figure.

A more realistic portrayal of a wolf hunt comes from Randy Newberg, who chronicled his trek with Matt Clyde through the rough terrain of Montana backcountry in the article “Like Elk, But Tougher.”  Newberg’s 11-day quest to “fill” his wolf tag began with ideas about the wolf as his competitor for elk, admitting he had “complained long and loud of what unmanaged wolf numbers were doing to our elk herds.”  When he and Clyde finally kill a wolf, however, he sees it instead as “an animal that needs elk as much as I need elk.  An animal that by no choice of his own was caught in a crossfire of competing political interests.” He describes the black wolf in detail, declaring it “beautiful,” then continues,

It did not seem like the evil, fairy tale figure responsible for the demise of western civilization, which one might conclude by listening to the barstool stories of wolf-haters. In a lot of ways, its life seemed not too different from mine. It was born a hunter. It spent its entire life learning prey and their habitats. It needs wild places, free of roads and development. So do I. It eats elk. So do I.

My respect had grown. My attitude had changed. Chasing wolves in these mountains can do that, even to the most serious elk hunter.

As a vocal critic of how the wolf delisting process occurred, I found myself examining my earlier ideas of what was fact and what was fiction.

Newberg is not alone in trying to sort reality from fairy tale.

The wolf has appeared regularly in twentieth and twenty-first century pop culture.  Movies like The Grey (2012) feature plane crash survivors who are picked off one-by-one by a pack of wolves. In the popular HBO series Game of Thrones, based on a series of novels by George R. R. Martin, the Stark family’s crest bears the Pleistocene-epoch dire wolf, and each of the Stark children adopts a dire wolf pup who, as it grows, becomes a familiar who protects them. Earlier, Farley Mowat’s 1963 book and 1983 movie Never Cry Wolf share the partially fictionalized tale of a wildlife biologist who finds that wolves’ impact on caribou herds isn’t as large as previously believed; in Mowat’s telling, the wolves survive part of the year on small game, including mice.

The wolf in European folklore

These popular culture manifestations of the wolf draw on older mythologies. For many Americans, our first introduction to the wolf is through folk tales and children’s stories, and the wolves that appear in them are rarely trustworthy. In some versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” for example, the wolf eats the grandmother and the girl—and they are never rescued by a huntsman who slices open the wolf.  Regardless of whether Little Red is resurrected from the wolf’s belly, in all versions of the tale the wolf is a manipulative, cunning, predatory creature who takes advantage of a naïve, innocent child. In various interpretations of the story, the wolf becomes a metaphor for night, winter, France, the chaos of nature, Little Red’s rite of passage into pubescence or womanhood, seduction, or rape.

Image by William Holbrook Beard, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Image by D. J. Munro, after images by Gustave Doré, courtesy of Archive.org and the New York Public Library

 

Similarly, in “The Three Little Pigs,” the wolf is malevolent and persistent, but we learn he can be outsmarted by the third, most thoughtful and careful pig.

Image by L. Leslie Brooke, courtesy of Archive.org

Image by John Rea Neill, courtesy of the University of Florida and Archive.org

The wolf in Native American folklore

While European folktales depict the wolf as untrustworthy or as an antagonist, the wolf that appears in western Native American folklore is a more ambiguous figure.  In Pueblo Tewa mythology, the wolf and other predators greet humans as they emerge from the earth. The predators knock down and scratch the first man to make this trip, but he heals quickly and the wolf and the other animals assure him he is among friends.  The animals outfit the man with hunting gear and provide him with the knowledge he needs to survive.  As James Burbank explains,

The knowledge that Wolf and other predators give to the Tewa hero is not knowledge of good and evil as in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, but knowledge of life and death and the interdependence of animal and human life cycles. It is an ecological knowledge.

The importance of, and attitude toward, the wolf has shifted in some indigenous cultures in the American West. In Navajo folklore, the wolf began its existence as an anthropomorphic figure, but increasingly it appeared in only its animal form and with diminished powers.  That does not mean, however, that the wolf lost the respect of the Navajo people; Steve Pavlik explains that in Navajo belief, the wolf’s “powers are still considerable. Consequently, wolves are thought (along with bears and coyotes) to be among the so-called dangerous animals in terms of the sickness they can bring to people who have offended them in some way.” Pavlik hypothesizes that some of the wolf’s fall from grace can be attributed to Navajo contact with European Christianity, which tends to associate wolves with evil. In other tales, it’s clear Wolf is a leader, even among chiefs; in still others, he is responsible for rescuing a people in peril or even for resurrecting people from death.  The wolf is so central to Navajo ideas about survival that the word naatl’eetsoh refers to not only wolves, but all hunters and predators, including human ones.

As told by Teresa Pijoan, one Zuni legend, White Wolf Woman, features a wolf who appears on several occasions to assist a woman traveling home after being kidnapped by the Navajo.  The wolf provides her with warmth, food, and protection as he helps her navigate to her village.  When she returns to her home to find her father’s dead body, she performs the funeral rites and then transforms into a white wolf.  The story holds that this wolf woman guides lost travelers to their homes.

In this video, Horace Axtell, a Nez Perce elder, World War II veteran, and a leader in the traditional Seven Drum religion, explains the close historical connection between the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) and the wolf.

The background noise in the video makes it difficult to hear Axtell’s story. Here are some of his remarks:

My grandmother used to talk to me about the wolf, and told me how important they were to our people when they lived out in the villages. . .They’d be sitting around the campfire at night, and all of a sudden they’d hear a wolf howl. . . And so they’d listen, and then the band would pretty much [remember] direction where the wolf sound was coming from, and they’d go over there in the morning, early. There’s a buck deer standing there, waiting for him. That’s the way it worked. That was a true story that Grandmother told me. That happened quite a few times.

That’s how important the wolf was to us, and never that I heard of anytime that our people had killed a wolf for the hide or anything–never did. Never did do that. It was always a close connection with the wolf and our people, the tribe, that way.

There are other things the wolf would do, also, to warn the tribe, warn the people if something else was going to try to come down, like a cougar, maybe. If that was going to happen, they’d come real close and do their howling to let, the warning. They were pretty closely connected to the wolf, and never did butcher a wolf for the pelt or anything. Never did bother them–they were pretty close with our people.

There’s a story I used to hear about the wolf, and so as I grew up, I had respect for the wolf, and when the wolf got brought back to Idaho, I went to Montana to greet them. They went down and tried to turn them loose, and then so many people objected, objected to the wolf turned loose in Idaho, that they chased them away. That wasn’t right to me, but then what can I say? That’s what happened.

They didn’t want the wolf back because. . .the stories that they heard about them killing the stock and all that, that’s what made them turn against the wolves. They’re still like that in Idaho. . .

I don’t know. . .they’re still going on. There’s nothing much I can do about it. All I can do is talk to my own people, still show respect for the wolf like my people did a long time ago. The connection still stands with my feelings. If I heard a wolf howl, I’d go investigate. I’m not afraid of them like [laughs], like some people are.

This man from Southern Idaho brought seven wolves up to our land in Lapwai, and he wanted a place to put them. . .a place for them to roam, to have wolves close by. . . I used to go up there to visit them, go right into the pen where they are. They come and put their paws on my hair and lick my face. That’s the way they greet you. I found that out; I wasn’t afraid of them. . .never got bit or anything.

That was my connection to the wolf. I still feel that way about the wolf. I’m not afraid of them, like some say they ought to be shot on sight. I’d sooner have a real eye connection with them; usually they look at you and then if they think you’re all right, they just walk away. I understand the wolf that way.

I never seen one shot yet, but I would probably object to that if I see it myself. . .

So this man from Idaho, from Southern Idaho, he brought these eight wolves up there, so I went up there. . .to greet the wolves at night. So I got my bell out and I start singing, and when I start singing, all the wolves start howling, every one of them, they howled as long as I was singing.

Axtell is not alone in feeling a special connection with the wolf. When wolves eventually were reintroduced to Idaho in 1995, the Nez Perce tribe took a leadership role in monitoring and reporting on individual wolves and packs.

But who or what is the wolf, beyond its representation in folklore and oral tradition? To better understand the wolf and our own reactions to it, let’s explore more of the history of its interactions with humans, its natural history, and its present biological and cultural status.

Continue to Wolves, Part III: The Historical Wolf

Print sources referenced in this section

James C. Burbank, “Great Beast God of the East,” from Vanishing Lobo: The Mexican Wolf in the Southwest (1990), rpt. in El Lobo: Readings on the Mexican Gray Wolf, ed. Tom Lynch. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005): 16-30.

Steve Pavlik, “Will Big Trotter Reclaim His Place? The Role of the Wolf in Navajo Tradition” (2000), in El Lobo: Readings on the Mexican Gray Wolf, ed. Tom Lynch. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005): 31-52.

Teresa Pijoan, White Wolf Woman: Native American Transformation Myths.  (Little Rock: August House Publishers, Inc., 1992): 54-58.

Redacted and added text from a draft of House Bill No. 294

Wolf populations have enjoyed a resurgence in Idaho in recent years thanks to successful management of reintroduced packs. Yet not everyone has welcomed the wolves, and in fact some have attempted to thwart the reestablishment of wolves in the state.  One need only look at the draft of a 2003 bill in the Idaho House of Representatives to understand the tensions between ranchers and hunters who would like to see the wolf once again eradicated and those who believe state or federal management of the wolf provides environmental and economic benefits to the state.

House Bill No. 294, which amended Section 36-715 of Idaho law, detailed the transition from federal management of the recovering wolf populations to state management of the packs, initially forbade state wildlife agencies from any kind of enforcement of the Endangered Species Act or other federal laws relating to wolves:

 The department of fish and game is not authorized to participate in investigations or enforcement actions involving violations of the final rules of the United States fish and wildlife service or section 9 or the United States endangered species act, as the final rules and section 9 regulate the reintroduction of wolves into central Idaho.

Other legislators, understanding that such language would ensure the federal government’s refusal to turn wolf management over to the state, removed those prohibitions, providing an entirely different set of instructions for the state’s wildlife agencies:

 The office of species conservation, in conjunction with the department [of fish and game], shall prepare and submit an annual report to the senate resources and environment committee and the house resources and conservation committee on the implementation and progress of the Idaho wolf conservation and management plan.

 Despite this encouragement to follow established wolf management guidelines, the previous section of House Bill No. 294 made clear that the state “is on the record asking the federal government to remove wolves from the state” and that the federal reintroduction of wolves in 1995 and 1996 impinged on “state sovereignty.”

How did Idaho and Idahoans arrive at this point?  Why are some Idahoans so opposed to the wolf’s very presence in the state? And how, despite the state leaders’ vocal resistance to federal reintroduction of gray wolves to central Idaho, did the state come to have such a thriving wolf population that the federal government trusted the state with its ongoing stewardship?

The answers to this question are more cultural than scientific or political. The stories that circulate among Idahoans and residents of other western states reveal much about our fears, anxieties, and hopes about the wolf and its recovery.

Continue to Wolves, Part II: The Wolf in Popular Culture and Folklore