WEBVTT - Ep. 14: Wolf West 0:00:01.639 --> 0:00:05.920 As native animals. Wolves shape American ecologies for millions of 0:00:06.000 --> 0:00:10.320 years and impressed early travelers with their numbers and tameness, 0:00:10.760 --> 0:00:13.560 but were rapidly destroyed in the West when old world 0:00:13.600 --> 0:00:18.720 stock raising replaced an Indian managed world. I'm Dan Flores 0:00:18.960 --> 0:00:22.640 and this is the American West, brought to you by 0:00:22.760 --> 0:00:26.439 Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt meets the harvest. A 0:00:26.520 --> 0:00:30.520 portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. 0:00:31.120 --> 0:00:35.680 Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com. 0:00:35.920 --> 0:00:54.840 Enjoy responsible Wolf West. 0:00:58.040 --> 0:01:01.279 At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, when Americans were 0:01:01.320 --> 0:01:04.920 regularly traveling through the West, but except for spotty locales 0:01:04.959 --> 0:01:07.840 in the Southwest and on the West Coast, had yet 0:01:07.880 --> 0:01:12.240 to settle it, aspects of the ancient Indian managed continent 0:01:12.600 --> 0:01:15.720 were still in place across much of the western country. 0:01:16.720 --> 0:01:19.279 Judging by the accounts of those who witnessed this period, 0:01:19.560 --> 0:01:23.759 the Catlans Bodmer's Autumns, this native West would have been 0:01:23.840 --> 0:01:26.880 something to see, one of the spectacles of the world. 0:01:27.959 --> 0:01:31.840 No element of this surviving version of Western America amazed 0:01:31.959 --> 0:01:36.200 travelers as much as the staggering abundance of wild animals 0:01:36.440 --> 0:01:39.160 and for people used to the civilized conditions of the 0:01:39.200 --> 0:01:43.279 East or Europe. No Western animal imparted as much shock 0:01:43.480 --> 0:01:48.440 and awe as wolves. Michael Steck, a physician traveling the 0:01:48.480 --> 0:01:51.800 Santa Fe Trail in the early eighteen fifties, was one 0:01:51.840 --> 0:01:54.360 of many who offers us a glimpse of what life 0:01:54.440 --> 0:01:57.880 in a fully wolfed West was like. Steck and his 0:01:57.960 --> 0:02:00.880 party found that any time they got among bison herds, 0:02:01.000 --> 0:02:05.440 wolves became so astonishingly numerous that, as he wrote, we 0:02:05.560 --> 0:02:09.440 see immense numbers of them. A common thing is to 0:02:09.480 --> 0:02:12.520 see fifty at a sight in the daytime. We are 0:02:12.639 --> 0:02:15.760 never out of sight of them, see hundreds in a day. 0:02:16.800 --> 0:02:20.800 That comported with wildlife painter John James Ottoman's comment on 0:02:20.880 --> 0:02:23.880 the Upper Missouri River that if ever there was a 0:02:23.919 --> 0:02:27.640 country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's the one we 0:02:27.680 --> 0:02:30.840 are now in. But here's the thing. 0:02:31.440 --> 0:02:31.919 Today. 0:02:32.240 --> 0:02:36.000 You could drive repeatedly across the country where Steck wrote 0:02:36.080 --> 0:02:39.760 of seeing hundreds of wolves a day, or along the Missouri, 0:02:39.800 --> 0:02:43.120 where Autobun reported the most abundant wolf population he had 0:02:43.160 --> 0:02:47.520 ever encountered, and never see a single wolf, not one. 0:02:47.560 --> 0:02:50.880 Our erasure of them in the years from eighteen fifty 0:02:50.960 --> 0:02:56.440 to nineteen twenty five was that thorough until about nineteen 0:02:56.520 --> 0:02:59.919 twenty five, though, the American West was, and for five 0:03:00.000 --> 0:03:05.080 five million years had been, wolf country. Consider that for 0:03:05.120 --> 0:03:10.000 a moment and understand what an anomaly the past almost 0:03:10.040 --> 0:03:13.760 wolf three hundred years has been to a story like that. 0:03:15.600 --> 0:03:19.799 The West wolves were from a family of animals, the Canaday, 0:03:20.000 --> 0:03:23.280 that evolved in North America, and although some of them 0:03:23.320 --> 0:03:26.880 migrated elsewhere and took on their present forms in Asia 0:03:26.960 --> 0:03:31.120 and Europe before they returned to America until the nineteen twenties, 0:03:31.160 --> 0:03:34.840 there was never a time when wolves were not America's 0:03:34.920 --> 0:03:40.120 keystone predators. Before humans first got here twenty two thousand 0:03:40.240 --> 0:03:43.560 or so years ago, wolves probably shaped life in America 0:03:43.560 --> 0:03:47.680 more profoundly than any other mammal. Wolves, in other words, 0:03:47.720 --> 0:03:51.760 played a crucial role in Western nature for millions of 0:03:51.840 --> 0:03:56.040 years before we ever set foot on the continent. Long 0:03:56.080 --> 0:04:00.600 before we Old Worlders arrived with our peculiar hatred of predators, 0:04:00.880 --> 0:04:04.200 virtually every ecology in the West was shaped from the 0:04:04.280 --> 0:04:08.800 top down by the presence of wolves. The Canaday family 0:04:09.120 --> 0:04:13.080 first appears in the fossil record of the American Southwest 0:04:13.400 --> 0:04:17.479 about five and a half million years ago. Like American 0:04:17.640 --> 0:04:23.880 evolved wild horses, our early wild canids became geographically cosmopolitan 0:04:24.160 --> 0:04:27.920 by crossing the land bridges connecting America to Eurasia. At 0:04:27.920 --> 0:04:30.640 the same time, there were other wolves at stayed home, 0:04:30.880 --> 0:04:34.880 giving rise to animals that became Eastern wolves and spawning 0:04:34.960 --> 0:04:37.720 the intriguing red wolf of the South. 0:04:37.600 --> 0:04:41.080 As well as coyotes. As we all know. 0:04:41.360 --> 0:04:46.240 Now from this year's the Extinction announcement from Colossal Bioengineering 0:04:46.520 --> 0:04:51.239 and full disclosure, I'm a member of Colossal's Conservation Advisory Board, 0:04:51.800 --> 0:04:56.320 the supersized American direwolf was also part of the candid 0:04:56.360 --> 0:05:00.960 mix in ancient America. There's still unresolved science dire wolves. 0:05:01.320 --> 0:05:05.000 A twenty twenty one article in Nature arguing that dire 0:05:05.080 --> 0:05:08.760 wolves may be different enough from other American wolves to 0:05:08.839 --> 0:05:13.880 belong in a genus other than Canus, one called Ainoscion. 0:05:14.880 --> 0:05:18.480 Before about twenty five thousand years ago, when gray wolves 0:05:18.520 --> 0:05:22.719 began loping home to America from Eurasia, very large and 0:05:22.960 --> 0:05:26.680 very white dire wolves dominated the wolf story in America. 0:05:27.520 --> 0:05:31.960 At Rancho Lebrea Tarpits in California, more than four thousand 0:05:32.120 --> 0:05:35.159 of these burly one hundred and fifty pound wolves died 0:05:35.200 --> 0:05:39.000 in the asphalt seeps. Their remains there outnumber those of 0:05:39.120 --> 0:05:43.960 gray wolves by one hundred to one. Game of Thrones 0:05:44.080 --> 0:05:45.160 and George R. R. 0:05:45.279 --> 0:05:45.599 Martin. 0:05:45.640 --> 0:05:49.680 Notwithstanding, dire wolves were not faded to survive the extinction 0:05:49.839 --> 0:05:53.400 crash that ended the American places, saying ten thousand years ago. 0:05:54.400 --> 0:05:58.680 During that great extinction pulse, smaller gray wolves somehow out 0:05:58.680 --> 0:06:03.320 competed dire wolves, but direwolf extinction still left America with 0:06:03.440 --> 0:06:07.840 a soup of several wolf types, including coyotes. There were 0:06:07.880 --> 0:06:11.320 no survivors of the direwolf genus. Ain't no psion though, 0:06:11.560 --> 0:06:15.840 until colossal scientists added into a gray wolf genome twenty 0:06:15.920 --> 0:06:20.400 specific genes of direwolf DNA from remains that were seventy 0:06:20.440 --> 0:06:24.680 two thousand and thirteen thousand years old, then, through a 0:06:24.800 --> 0:06:30.080 surrogate mother, scientist birth Romulus Remus and Callisi in late 0:06:30.160 --> 0:06:34.839 twenty twenty four and early twenty twenty five. As for 0:06:34.920 --> 0:06:38.159 gray wolves, once they joined the other American canids in 0:06:38.200 --> 0:06:42.920 the late Pleistocene, they decidedly made their presence felt. Big 0:06:43.080 --> 0:06:46.120 five to six foot long pack hunters weighing eighty to 0:06:46.200 --> 0:06:49.599 one hundred and twenty pounds, gray wolves outmatched their long 0:06:49.680 --> 0:06:53.799 lost relations Eastern and red wolves and coyotes in both 0:06:53.960 --> 0:06:58.440 size and packing stings. Once direwolves disappeared from the continent, 0:06:58.680 --> 0:07:02.560 gray wolves were left at the swaggering big dogs. Everywhere, 0:07:02.680 --> 0:07:06.960 including the West, gray wolves seem to have migrated home 0:07:07.000 --> 0:07:12.280 to America in distinctive waves half a century ago. Biological 0:07:12.400 --> 0:07:17.560 taxonomy designated a wopping twenty three species of Canus loupus. 0:07:18.160 --> 0:07:21.200 In twenty eleven, though, the US Fish and Wildlife Service 0:07:21.240 --> 0:07:24.440 decided to come to terms with modern genetic research on 0:07:24.520 --> 0:07:29.480 wolves and concluded that North America's wolves sprang from two origins. 0:07:30.000 --> 0:07:35.040 Eastern wolves, red wolves, and coyotes all represented American wolf 0:07:35.080 --> 0:07:39.120 evolution animals that never left the continent. Gray Wolves, on 0:07:39.160 --> 0:07:42.760 the other hand, constituted animals that had started here, spent 0:07:42.880 --> 0:07:46.640 some millions of years in Eurasia, then returned in several 0:07:46.840 --> 0:07:52.040 separate distinct waves of animals during the Pleisocene. This taxonomic 0:07:52.120 --> 0:07:55.480 rethink has shrunk the number of gray wolf subspecies from 0:07:55.520 --> 0:07:59.239 the twenty three of the nineteen forties down to only four. 0:08:00.080 --> 0:08:01.240 Arctic white wolves. 0:08:01.440 --> 0:08:04.560 Canus lupus arctos, found in the extreme north of the 0:08:04.600 --> 0:08:07.760 continent were probably the last to come home to America. 0:08:08.160 --> 0:08:12.360 The rocky mountain wolf Canus Lupus occidentalis, found from the 0:08:12.400 --> 0:08:16.720 Montana Rockies northward to Alaska, was likely another late arrival 0:08:16.760 --> 0:08:19.800 from Asia. The small gray wolves of Mexico and the 0:08:19.840 --> 0:08:24.600 American Southwest Canus Lupus bailei, the Mexican wolf, may have 0:08:24.760 --> 0:08:28.040 led the migrations home. But the wolf that occupied more 0:08:28.040 --> 0:08:31.720 of America than any other, extending from the Pacific across 0:08:31.760 --> 0:08:35.200 the Great Plains, onto the western Great Lakes, and northward 0:08:35.280 --> 0:08:38.400 through much of the eastern half of Canada, was Canus 0:08:38.480 --> 0:08:43.560 lupus nubilus. This was the famed buffalo wolf, the Lobo 0:08:43.920 --> 0:08:47.280 loafer or white wolf of the plains of so much 0:08:47.320 --> 0:08:52.640 Western history. All these gray wolves arrived in time for 0:08:52.720 --> 0:08:56.960 one of the grandest predator barbecues in world history. Before 0:08:56.960 --> 0:09:01.360 the Pleistocene ended, gray wolves joined short face bears, saber 0:09:01.440 --> 0:09:06.080 tooth and scimitar cats, false cheetahs, step lions, and running 0:09:06.200 --> 0:09:11.840 hyenas to chase and pull down camels, sloths, horses, longhorned bison, 0:09:12.040 --> 0:09:15.520 and perhaps mammoth calfs in an Africa like world that 0:09:15.640 --> 0:09:19.400 almost seems like science fiction to us now. After the 0:09:19.400 --> 0:09:23.880 Pleascistine extinctions took out all the giants. A reconstituted western 0:09:23.920 --> 0:09:27.960 Bestieri bequeathed to Western gray wolves their classic place in 0:09:28.040 --> 0:09:32.840 American ecology, with buffalo the only western grazer still standing. 0:09:32.880 --> 0:09:37.200 After the extinctions, bison numbers skyrocketed to between twenty to 0:09:37.320 --> 0:09:40.600 thirty million animals, some one and a half to two 0:09:40.640 --> 0:09:44.719 million buffalo wolves served as their primary predators in this 0:09:44.840 --> 0:09:49.400 new order, As famed Western trader and author Josiah Gregg 0:09:49.480 --> 0:09:52.680 put it in the eighteen forties, although the buffalo is 0:09:52.720 --> 0:09:56.439 the largest, he has by no means the control among 0:09:56.520 --> 0:10:00.880 the prairie animals. The scepter of authority has been lodged 0:10:01.000 --> 0:10:06.880 with the large gray wolf as keystone predators. Wolves apparently 0:10:07.000 --> 0:10:11.800 influence continental ecology and ways that ripple through nature, affecting 0:10:11.920 --> 0:10:16.000 not just populations of prey species, but also other predators 0:10:16.040 --> 0:10:19.520 and scavengers, even down to the kind of vegetation like 0:10:19.640 --> 0:10:24.320 aspens or cottonwoods found on a landscape. With gray wolves present, 0:10:24.679 --> 0:10:28.840 coyote populations went down and fox numbers went up, and 0:10:28.920 --> 0:10:32.200 a kind of bigger dog beats up littler dog equation. 0:10:32.920 --> 0:10:37.600 Wolf predation exerts strong evolutionary pressures on the behaviors and 0:10:37.720 --> 0:10:42.319 even habitat selections of wolf prey species. Such was the 0:10:42.360 --> 0:10:46.439 scepter of authority the gray wolf wielded on Western landscapes 0:10:46.480 --> 0:10:50.079 a century ago, and for multiple millions of years before that, 0:10:50.800 --> 0:10:52.959 Wild America was a world in. 0:10:53.000 --> 0:10:59.720 Good part created by wolves. In a North America. 0:10:59.200 --> 0:11:04.880 Inhabited by native people who never domesticated or herded wild ungulates, 0:11:05.280 --> 0:11:08.560 and who thought of all wolves as kin teachers and 0:11:08.679 --> 0:11:12.080 totem animals. Wolves were free to play their top of 0:11:12.120 --> 0:11:16.680 the pyramid roles as keystone predators, shaping ecologies down to 0:11:16.720 --> 0:11:19.880 the birds that sang and the plants that grew. But 0:11:19.960 --> 0:11:22.920 four hundred years ago, the arrival of Old worlders at 0:11:22.960 --> 0:11:27.800 once challenged that ancient algorithm from the Old World's foothold 0:11:27.800 --> 0:11:32.640 in Massachusetts, Bostonian William Wood wrote of the wolf from 0:11:32.679 --> 0:11:37.839 the very beginning as a special and confusing problem for colonizers. 0:11:38.800 --> 0:11:42.720 The confusion came from America's wolves not acting the way 0:11:42.840 --> 0:11:48.760 Europeans had been told wolves should act. In America, Wood wrote, 0:11:49.160 --> 0:11:53.360 it was never known yet that a wolf ever set 0:11:53.520 --> 0:11:57.520 up on a man or a woman. That seemed impossible, 0:11:57.800 --> 0:12:01.120 given the folk traditions about wolves in the Old World. 0:12:01.760 --> 0:12:06.200 All those folk tales and biblical passages about ravening wolves 0:12:06.440 --> 0:12:11.600 left colonists disoriented when America's wolves showed no aggression towards people. 0:12:12.200 --> 0:12:15.400 But wolves in the numbers of America held were still unexpected, 0:12:15.679 --> 0:12:19.040 and that led to a certain despair in sixteen thirties 0:12:19.120 --> 0:12:22.880 New England, since, as Wood put it, there's little hope 0:12:23.000 --> 0:12:27.760 of their utter destruction. So from the start the wolf 0:12:27.880 --> 0:12:31.559 was an animal of special concern for Europeans. But why 0:12:32.679 --> 0:12:36.680 Partly there was their lack of familiarity with the real thing. 0:12:37.559 --> 0:12:42.720 England's own wolves hadn't lasted beyond the fourteen hundreds. Virginians 0:12:42.760 --> 0:12:45.680 and New Englanders were living among wolves for the first 0:12:45.720 --> 0:12:48.880 time in their lives, and, as Wood implied, they didn't 0:12:48.960 --> 0:12:52.000 like it in the least. Then there were their imported 0:12:52.080 --> 0:12:56.400 cultural traditions. When you had hearded domesticated animals for eight 0:12:56.440 --> 0:13:00.760 thousand years, as these old worlders had, and was your 0:13:00.800 --> 0:13:03.360 way of understanding how the world worked, there was a 0:13:03.480 --> 0:13:09.080 natural tendency to see wolves as a supernatural malediction. For Christians. 0:13:09.280 --> 0:13:12.280 Adams fall from the Garden of Eden into an earth 0:13:12.400 --> 0:13:16.480 compromised by evil struck them as the self evident origin 0:13:16.640 --> 0:13:20.640 of wolves, After all, didn't wolves share the yellow eyes 0:13:20.960 --> 0:13:25.800 medieval illustration gave to Satan. Some of America's wolves were 0:13:25.840 --> 0:13:30.400 even black, a coloring that to Europeans was suspicious in 0:13:30.440 --> 0:13:34.680 the sixteen twenties. The actual explanation for black wolves lay 0:13:34.760 --> 0:13:39.360 in scientific work four centuries in the future. A genomic 0:13:39.440 --> 0:13:43.079 study from our time indicates that black coachs in America's 0:13:43.120 --> 0:13:47.360 wolves sprang from a hybridization event between wolves and domestic 0:13:47.440 --> 0:13:51.920 dogs in the northwest of the continent approximately thirteen thousand 0:13:52.040 --> 0:13:57.720 years back during Clovis times. The mutation conferred a fitness advantage, 0:13:57.760 --> 0:14:01.760 perhaps in disease resistance, that other wolves sensed, so the 0:14:01.920 --> 0:14:06.640 visual clue of blackness affected mating choice, allowing at least 0:14:06.760 --> 0:14:10.439 some black wolves to greet Europeans. Thousands of years later, 0:14:12.480 --> 0:14:16.920 Native people admired wolves, whatever their color, for their bravery, 0:14:17.160 --> 0:14:21.760 hunting skills, and devotion to mates and packs. Europeans saw 0:14:21.920 --> 0:14:26.440 those same animals as bloodthirsty monsters, evil actors in a 0:14:26.520 --> 0:14:30.920 fallen world. Folk stories of were wolves dim memories of 0:14:31.080 --> 0:14:35.840 part human, part animal fantasies from the Paleolithic still circulated 0:14:35.880 --> 0:14:39.560 in colonial times and fed a suspicion that wolves might 0:14:39.640 --> 0:14:44.760 be avatars of a residual animality in humans, so the 0:14:45.000 --> 0:14:50.320 unsuspecting animals were soon to enjoy the full colonial experience 0:14:50.520 --> 0:14:51.400 of a wolf war. 0:14:53.120 --> 0:14:55.680 The reality was that wolf. 0:14:55.560 --> 0:14:59.600 Social lives and ecological roles were so similar to our 0:14:59.640 --> 0:15:02.920 own that it was no accident that tamed wolves had 0:15:02.960 --> 0:15:06.760 become our first domesticated animals twenty five thousand years before. 0:15:07.800 --> 0:15:13.240 Wolf societies were much like human hunter gatherer bands. In both, 0:15:13.440 --> 0:15:18.760 the leadership was usually matriarchal. The alpha female wolf directs 0:15:18.760 --> 0:15:22.680 a pack's movements, while the larger males, especially those between 0:15:22.720 --> 0:15:25.840 about two and five years old, are the primary hunters. 0:15:26.600 --> 0:15:30.680 As highly social creatures, wolves are members of family packs 0:15:30.840 --> 0:15:35.040 led by high status breeders who avoid breeding with close kin, 0:15:35.600 --> 0:15:39.120 so a pack's grown pups eventually move out in search 0:15:39.160 --> 0:15:45.040 of mating opportunities. While they're individualistic, wolf pups like young humans, 0:15:45.320 --> 0:15:49.440 learned from their elders, they are steep in pack culture. 0:15:50.480 --> 0:15:55.880 Wolves have strong emotional attachments. After absences, they greet by 0:15:55.920 --> 0:16:00.200 standing on their hind legs, a greeting known as a rally. 0:16:00.480 --> 0:16:04.120 They also interact with a remarkable range of body language 0:16:04.160 --> 0:16:08.720 and facial expressions, howling, which is contagious for wolves is 0:16:08.760 --> 0:16:11.840 one of their common ways to express their emotional states, 0:16:11.960 --> 0:16:15.040 and it enables them to recognize distant wolves from the 0:16:15.080 --> 0:16:19.320 harmonic structure of their voices. No one knows how many 0:16:19.320 --> 0:16:24.280 wolves were in colonial America, but since food determines pup survival, 0:16:24.520 --> 0:16:28.480 the population of wolves in any given setting rested on 0:16:28.680 --> 0:16:33.520 food availability. This means that packs competed with one another 0:16:33.880 --> 0:16:38.440 for prime prey territories. In fact, before Old Worlders arrived, 0:16:38.680 --> 0:16:44.360 the main mortality in wolves came from other wolves. Europeans 0:16:44.360 --> 0:16:50.000 imagined America's wolves as vicious slaughterers of helpless prey. In 0:16:50.040 --> 0:16:53.680 the real world, something different was playing out. Chasing down 0:16:53.720 --> 0:16:56.760 in neck wrestling big animals armed with hooves and antlers 0:16:56.880 --> 0:17:01.240 is dangerous in the extreme despite their wrong jaw muscles. 0:17:01.400 --> 0:17:05.840 The geometry of wolve's long muzzles actually inhibits their bite 0:17:05.880 --> 0:17:10.760 force so impossible, they go for low hanging fruit. Highly 0:17:10.800 --> 0:17:16.080 perceptive about cost benefit, they scavenge animals already dead on 0:17:16.119 --> 0:17:20.679 the hunt. They try for fawns and young animals are injured, diseased, 0:17:20.840 --> 0:17:24.280 or old ones. Their strategy is to test prey in 0:17:24.320 --> 0:17:27.720 search of those least dangerous and easiest to run down. 0:17:28.400 --> 0:17:30.440 Even then, wolf chase. 0:17:30.280 --> 0:17:36.040 Success dips as low as ten percent. One of Western 0:17:36.080 --> 0:17:40.959 painter George Catlan's memorable observations was about how dearly a 0:17:41.000 --> 0:17:45.359 wolf pack won a meal. Even an old or sick buffalo, 0:17:45.520 --> 0:17:49.359 he wrote, was a huge and furious animal, and would 0:17:49.400 --> 0:17:54.000 often deal death by wholesale to his canine assailants, as 0:17:54.080 --> 0:17:57.320 Catlan put it, which he is tossing into the air 0:17:57.720 --> 0:18:02.560 or stamping to death under his feet. Catlan's painting White 0:18:02.680 --> 0:18:07.120 Wolves Attacking Buffalo showed such a scene with an aging 0:18:07.240 --> 0:18:11.800 bull fighting a wolfpack with such resolution that, as Catlan wrote, 0:18:11.920 --> 0:18:14.679 his eyes were entirely eaten out of his head, the 0:18:14.800 --> 0:18:18.000 grizzle of his nose was mostly gone, his tongue was 0:18:18.040 --> 0:18:20.520 half eaten off, and the skin and flesh of his 0:18:20.640 --> 0:18:24.560 legs torn almost literally into strings. Yet even with the 0:18:24.600 --> 0:18:28.520 bull in that condition, numerous wolves, as Catlan said, were 0:18:28.640 --> 0:18:31.680 crushed to death by the feet or horns. 0:18:31.320 --> 0:18:31.800 Of the bull. 0:18:33.240 --> 0:18:36.959 This kind of wolf natural history was invisible to the 0:18:37.000 --> 0:18:40.760 new colonists, because all the settlers really cared about was 0:18:40.880 --> 0:18:46.320 fashioning a wolf free America. In fact, Woods, Massachusetts Colony 0:18:46.480 --> 0:18:51.800 passed the first environmental law in colonial American history. It 0:18:51.880 --> 0:19:00.960 was a bounty on the continents wolves. When Western travelers 0:19:01.000 --> 0:19:04.720 like Meriwether Lewis, George Catlin, and John James Ottoman first 0:19:04.760 --> 0:19:07.720 observed wolves in the West, they referred to them as 0:19:07.960 --> 0:19:12.240 the shepherds of the buffalo herds. Josiah Gregg said of 0:19:12.280 --> 0:19:16.720 plains lobos that although there were immense numbers of them 0:19:16.880 --> 0:19:20.359 upon the prairies, their presence in the landscape was often 0:19:20.400 --> 0:19:25.400 determined by bison herds. In this regard, Western wolves resembled 0:19:25.480 --> 0:19:29.400 grizzly bears, always found in largest numbers where they could 0:19:29.440 --> 0:19:33.800 scavenge buffalo drowned in rivers, or where weak animals were 0:19:33.840 --> 0:19:38.760 easier to attack. William Clark observed the most common wolf 0:19:38.840 --> 0:19:42.359 hunting technique for buffalo in April of eighteen oh five, 0:19:42.640 --> 0:19:45.320 when Lewis and Clark were ascending the Missouri through what 0:19:45.520 --> 0:19:50.200 is now North Dakota. Lewis wrote that Captain Clark informed 0:19:50.240 --> 0:19:53.560 me that he saw a large drove of buffalo pursued 0:19:53.600 --> 0:19:56.879 by wolves today that they at length caught a calf 0:19:57.080 --> 0:20:00.600 which was unable to keep up with the herd. An 0:20:00.680 --> 0:20:04.800 old Pawnee adage, in fact, was that wolves ran down 0:20:05.000 --> 0:20:09.320 and devoured four out of every ten bison calves born 0:20:09.840 --> 0:20:14.879 an ancient American equation that left both species healthy across 0:20:15.000 --> 0:20:19.640 at least half a million years. One trade everyone commented 0:20:19.680 --> 0:20:22.639 on when they were first among the West wolves was 0:20:22.680 --> 0:20:26.000 how tame they were, Having no reason to fear wolves. 0:20:26.200 --> 0:20:30.120 Native people had long let them hang around camps and villages, 0:20:30.560 --> 0:20:34.000 so Audubon had marveled at how wolves would lie on 0:20:34.119 --> 0:20:38.360 the banks as their steamboat passed, yawning at them like dogs. 0:20:38.920 --> 0:20:43.080 William Clark had an unconcerned wolf walk by so near 0:20:43.320 --> 0:20:46.480 that he impulsively stabbed it with the ban at on 0:20:46.560 --> 0:20:50.960 the muzzle of his rifle. At Fort Union, Audubon's party 0:20:51.119 --> 0:20:55.439 was met by the American Fur Company's Alexander Culbertson, whose 0:20:55.560 --> 0:20:59.400 chief hobby, when boredom set in, was running down wolves 0:20:59.400 --> 0:21:04.639 on his Indian pony. As Audubon's companion Edward Harris described it, 0:21:04.960 --> 0:21:08.880 with wolves in constant view, the trader offered their party 0:21:09.160 --> 0:21:11.000 a little wolf entertainment. 0:21:11.680 --> 0:21:14.040 Mister Culbertson, Harris tells us. 0:21:14.240 --> 0:21:18.880 Started his beautiful blackfoot pied mare at full speed when 0:21:19.000 --> 0:21:21.919 within half a mile of the wolf, who turned and 0:21:22.080 --> 0:21:26.720 galloped off leisurely until mister Culbertson was within two or 0:21:26.760 --> 0:21:29.560 three hundred yards of him when he started. 0:21:29.119 --> 0:21:30.800 Off at the top of his speed. 0:21:31.440 --> 0:21:34.080 Within the time it took Harris to scribble his account, 0:21:34.440 --> 0:21:37.280 Culbertson was back at the post with the wolf draped 0:21:37.320 --> 0:21:40.520 across the saddle horn shot through its shoulders as the 0:21:40.560 --> 0:21:44.560 trader had chased him at breakneck speed across the prairie. 0:21:44.960 --> 0:21:47.840 It was an impressive performance, no doubt, so long as 0:21:47.840 --> 0:21:51.000 you hadn't experienced it from the wolf end of the show. 0:21:53.119 --> 0:21:56.480 Centuries of peaceful relations with native peoples had taught the 0:21:56.520 --> 0:22:01.560 West wolves not to fear humans right old world folklore, 0:22:01.920 --> 0:22:07.000 Western bar talk, and Hollywood's sensationalism. Today, like Liam Neeson's 0:22:07.040 --> 0:22:10.880 twenty eleven film The Gray, the truth is that, except 0:22:10.880 --> 0:22:14.560 in the rare rabies case, the West wolves were in 0:22:14.680 --> 0:22:18.239 no way aggressive towards people. In fact, it was a 0:22:18.280 --> 0:22:22.960 Western trope that both wolves and coyotes were rank howards 0:22:23.080 --> 0:22:27.879 around humans. While scornful of canine cowardice, early observers in 0:22:27.920 --> 0:22:31.359 the West never tired of commenting about how trusting wolves 0:22:31.359 --> 0:22:33.919 seem to be trotting in front of their horses like 0:22:34.040 --> 0:22:38.960 dogs are sitting and watching curiously as travelers passed within feet, 0:22:40.359 --> 0:22:43.879 But soon enough, with everyone traveling the West's armed to 0:22:43.960 --> 0:22:47.479 the teeth and taking shots at almost every wolf they saw, 0:22:47.640 --> 0:22:51.160 wolves learned to keep their distance. Rifle fire was an 0:22:51.200 --> 0:22:55.119 initial and casual wolf persecution, but it was merely a 0:22:55.200 --> 0:22:58.560 hint of the changes about to come. In rapid succession 0:22:58.920 --> 0:23:03.440 across the nineteen shi century, with a wild animal products 0:23:03.480 --> 0:23:07.439 industry well established in the West and many thousands of 0:23:07.600 --> 0:23:11.480 overland migrants crossing the region every year, what should have 0:23:11.520 --> 0:23:15.960 been canine good times actually ushered in the end game 0:23:16.280 --> 0:23:20.679 for the wolf West. In eighteen seventy two, the Brooklyn 0:23:20.760 --> 0:23:25.879 painter John Gast distilled an important assumption about both Indians 0:23:26.240 --> 0:23:31.720 and the country's wild animals into a famous visual image. 0:23:32.080 --> 0:23:37.840 Gas American Progress painting portrayed a blonde, giant and angelic 0:23:37.960 --> 0:23:43.640 white garb striding across the West, stringing telegraph wires behind her, 0:23:44.000 --> 0:23:48.480 with wagons of settlers in her wake. Disappearing off the 0:23:48.720 --> 0:23:52.000 edges of the canvas were the native people, but also 0:23:52.240 --> 0:23:56.320 herds of buffalo and packs of wolves consigned to the 0:23:56.359 --> 0:24:00.199 margins of the future. Viewers of American Progress seen to 0:24:00.280 --> 0:24:04.200 understand in an America modeled on Europe, not just the 0:24:04.320 --> 0:24:08.920 native people, but all those iconic wild animals had to go. 0:24:09.720 --> 0:24:13.000 Most Americans appeared to assume that in an America making 0:24:13.040 --> 0:24:16.320 itself a clone of the old world, a fate of 0:24:16.359 --> 0:24:20.800 animals like this was inevitable. Buffalo stood first in the 0:24:20.880 --> 0:24:25.800 rank of those incompatible with civilization. Wolves well the plans 0:24:25.800 --> 0:24:30.600 since colonial times had been their total eradication. Eventually, other animals, 0:24:30.680 --> 0:24:35.520 grizzly bears, cougars, jaguars, wild horses, eagles, and, judging by 0:24:35.520 --> 0:24:39.199 the reaction to their extinction, even passenger pigeons joined the 0:24:39.280 --> 0:24:46.200 ranks of species. Civilization would not tolerate their destruction. Gas painting, implied, 0:24:46.480 --> 0:24:51.200 was no one's fault. Simply enough, Ancient America's time was over. 0:24:51.880 --> 0:24:57.320 Incompatibility was a shame, but it seemed to comfort us. 0:24:57.359 --> 0:25:01.679 Distilled from the imported nuts of East India tree, a 0:25:01.760 --> 0:25:06.760 substance called strychnine ushered in this new order. It became 0:25:06.800 --> 0:25:11.040 available in America when a firm in Philadelphia began offering 0:25:11.200 --> 0:25:16.160 cheap packages of strychnine in crystal form in eighteen thirty four. 0:25:17.240 --> 0:25:19.880 Since there were few predators left in the East by then, 0:25:20.240 --> 0:25:23.600 most of the poison went west, sold in bulk in 0:25:23.760 --> 0:25:28.200 every store and trading post. Naturally, there were no restrictions 0:25:28.200 --> 0:25:32.000 of any kind on its use. It was cheap, unregulated, 0:25:32.200 --> 0:25:36.280 and it was lethal chemical warfare. Western travelers used it 0:25:36.359 --> 0:25:39.160 both to collect pelts and just to see its effects. 0:25:40.119 --> 0:25:44.199 In an age inured to carnage, it was a horrifying killer. 0:25:44.600 --> 0:25:47.800 Inside a few minutes, a white tablet gulped down from 0:25:47.800 --> 0:25:52.440 a bated carcass launched a victim into waves of convulsive cramping. 0:25:53.000 --> 0:25:57.480 Poisoned wolves died from asphyxiation, but strychnine wrenched the body 0:25:57.600 --> 0:26:01.639 so violently as to leave a signature death pose, a 0:26:01.760 --> 0:26:06.200 corpse with a sharply arched spine and a tail frazzled 0:26:06.359 --> 0:26:10.879 as if the animal had been electrocuted on the frontier. 0:26:11.200 --> 0:26:14.840 People who did this for a living were called wolfers, 0:26:15.119 --> 0:26:19.760 a Western occupation we've probably deliberately left in the dust 0:26:19.840 --> 0:26:22.320 bin of history so we didn't have to look at 0:26:22.320 --> 0:26:27.360 it too closely. Poisoning animals didn't even require a wolfer 0:26:27.520 --> 0:26:31.280 to be present, and unlike trapping, poisoning didn't call for 0:26:31.359 --> 0:26:34.520 any sort of skill. You just baited a carcass or 0:26:34.600 --> 0:26:37.320 put out chunks of meat laced with poison, and then 0:26:37.359 --> 0:26:40.040 headed a camp to enjoy life while the strychnine did 0:26:40.080 --> 0:26:44.560 his work. Teams of wolfers driving ox dron wagons began 0:26:44.720 --> 0:26:48.720 laying out strychnine in the Yellowstone Country as early as 0:26:48.760 --> 0:26:53.880 eighteen sixty four. Approaching a buffalo or horse carcass that baited, 0:26:54.240 --> 0:26:59.240 wolfers would start finding victims appearing sprayed across the landscape 0:26:59.320 --> 0:27:02.960 as if by some spinning centrifuge a half mile from 0:27:02.960 --> 0:27:06.359 their bait animal. The targets were wolves and coyotes, but 0:27:06.560 --> 0:27:13.360 the poison killed everything interested in a rotting piece of meat. Eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies, 0:27:13.520 --> 0:27:18.800 red foxes, gray foxes, swift foxes, tiny kit foxes, skunks. 0:27:19.520 --> 0:27:24.880 As these animals died, their convulsive vomiting sprayed poison across 0:27:24.920 --> 0:27:30.120 the grass. Poison grass could take out collateral victims like horses. 0:27:30.960 --> 0:27:34.000 When Native people lost ponies this way, they developed a 0:27:34.119 --> 0:27:38.639 special hatred for wolfers. This kind of poisoning preyed on 0:27:38.720 --> 0:27:43.439 a wolf's inclination to scavenge and avoid injury in a hunt, 0:27:43.760 --> 0:27:48.440 and astonishing forty dead wolves per bated carcass was common. 0:27:49.040 --> 0:27:52.720 One party in the Texas Panhandle picked up sixty four 0:27:52.800 --> 0:27:56.360 wolves one morning, barely a mile from their camp. They 0:27:56.359 --> 0:28:00.240 made four thousand dollars in one winter, and can this. 0:28:00.640 --> 0:28:04.600 James Mead once poisoned eighty two wolves in a single 0:28:04.640 --> 0:28:09.280 baiting in the Texas Panhandle. Into the eighteen nineties, Wolfer's 0:28:09.440 --> 0:28:14.320 Jack Abernathy Alan Stagg, and Alec Lewis averaged two hundred 0:28:14.560 --> 0:28:18.240 monsters that was their nickname for gray wolves a year, 0:28:18.800 --> 0:28:21.600 killing two hundred and ninety six one year on a 0:28:21.640 --> 0:28:26.600 single giant ranch the Xit. For more than two decades, 0:28:26.760 --> 0:28:30.240 wolf and coyote pelts traded as money in the West, 0:28:30.600 --> 0:28:33.400