The History of Wolves in Texas

"The Wolves of Texas"

Texas used to be home to several subspecies of gray wolf. The Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) was once found in the western part of the state. Canis lupus monstrab, the Texas gray wolf, occurred in central and southern Texas, while the "buffalo" wolf, Canis lupus nubilis, followed the bison herds across the Staked Plains. A separate species, the red wolf (Canis rufus), once ranged throughout much of east Texas. The buffalo wolf was extinct by 1926, the Texas gray wolf by 1942. (Wolf taxonomy was revised a few years ago to reclassify twelve of the original subspecies occurring in the western United States and central Canada as C. l. nubilisnubilis is not extinct according to that revision.) The last two wild Mexican wolves in Texas were killed in 1970, and by the late 1980s the Mexican wolf -- currently the most endangered of all the subspecies -- was believed to be extinct in the wild. In the early 1970s there were so few red wolves remaining in a handful of southeastern Texas counties that they had begun interbreeding with coyotes. When the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service embarked on a program to save Canis rufus from extinction, they could find only 17 red wolves sufficiently free of coyote DNA and therefore suitable for a captive breeding program's gene pool.

According to one theory, the first wolf-like mammal in the Northern Hemisphere originated in what is now Texas during the Pleistocene era, around one million years ago. About the size of today's coyote, it grew larger over time and spread northward, migrating into Eurasia via the Beringia land bridge, and there evolved into the progenitor of the gray wolf, which returned to North America by the same route 300,000 to 600,000 years ago. In the 20th century Texas was one of the last of the wolf's strongholds as it was systematically eradicated from the lower 48 states. as Americans expanded westward they ruthlessly persecuted the wolf, deeming it a dangerous creature that competed with them for game and threatened their livestock. "There are two species," wrote William Bollaert, who came to Texas in the early 19th century.

 "The large black wolf and the prairie wolf. They are hunted and shot. They destroy young cattle."

Texas was wolf country, and the wolf is very much a part of the Texas heritage. But today no wild wolves run free in the state. Bollaert described the traditional approach to wolves that was already centuries old when he wrote those words; it is an approach that continued to rule the day until fairly recently. Now the wolf is making a comeback, and a strong majority of Americans support wolf recovery. One day soon the wolf will come home to Texas.

Like most Native Americans, the Tonkawas of Central Texas admired and coexisted with the wolf. They believed that a terrible fate would befall anyone who killed a wolf, because it was the wolf who had brought man into the world. In the 1850s, Colonel Randolph B. Marcy visited Texas to make surveys for Indian reservations, and reported on a Tonkawa ritual called the Wolf Dance. Fifty warriors dressed in wolf skins entered a large )dance lodge" on all fours, perfectly imitating the behavior of wolves. They sniffed the earth and at length began to dig, exhuming another warrior who had previously been buried just below the surface. This warrior, acting out his part, protested being brought from the spirit world where his every need had been attended to. A council of older wolves discussed what was to be done with him, and decided that he should remain on earth and become a hunter.

Early white settlers had their own wolf-related legends. In 1834 an English colony was established near the Rio Grande on a grant given Dr. John Charles Beales by the Republic of Mexico. One member of this colony was George Dent, a loner who made his way as a trapper along the Devil's River. Dent was married, and his pregnant wife went into labor when they were far removed from the colony. Leaving his wife, who was unable to travel, Dent rode for help, and found a Mexican shepherd who agreed to accompany the trapper back to his camp, and brought his own wife along to assist with the birthing. Arriving at the camp, they found Dent's wife dead from childbirth. The newborn was gone, and wolf tracks were seen. Dent assumed his child was also dead.

Years passed, and then came reports of a girl seen running with a wolf pack. Seminole scouts stationed at a nearby military post were sent out to investigate and found small human footprints mingled with the wolf sign. A search party tracked down the pack and captured the girl. Uncontrollably wild, she was locked in a shed while the men debated what was to be done with her. In the night the wolves came and attacked the men's horses. This, however, was only a diversion; assisted by the wolves, the girl loosened a plank in the shed wall and escaped. For 50 years there were occasional sightings of the Wolf Girl of Devil's River. Or so they say.

Wolves followed the great bison herds in all seasons, day and night, preying on stragglers. Occasionally they attacked wild horses. The mustangs would form a circle and battle with teeth and hooves; if they ran the wolves would give chase and sometimes succeed in bringing down a mare. In 1855, Alexander Ross wrote in his book The Fur Hunters of the Far West how usually only two wolves would initially approach a horse while the rest of the pack hung back. The pair of wolves behaved "in the most playful manner, lying, rolling and frisking about until the too credulous victim is completely put off his guard by curiosity." Suddenly the wolves attacked in unison, one springing at the horse's throat, the other at its hindquarters. As the mustang fell, the rest of the pack rushed in to finish it off.

After the Civil War, wolf skins were of some value, bringing one to two dollars apiece, and hundreds of men made a living as professional wolf hunters, or "wolfers." Finding the wolf was easy -- all one had to do was find the bison. The wolfer would kill a buffalo, make cuts in the carcass with his knife, and pour strychnine into the cuts. A poisoned carcass could sometimes claim as many as 100 wolves and coyotes. An industrious wolfer could make several thousand dollars a year. In Texas, wolfers frequented the Staked Plains where the buffalo roamed.

William Banta, a buffalo hunter who later became a Texas Ranger, often encountered wolves on the Llano Estacado. In his book Twenty Seven Years on the Texas Frontier, Banta wrote of one incident in which a member of his hunting party turned up missing in the dead of winter. Banta and his companions went in search of the missing man, and finally found him far from camp and afoot. The man explained that he had killed a buffalo and skinned it, but when the weather turned bad he rolled up in the green hide to avoid freezing to death. Wolves came to feed on the buffalo carcass, and some began to chew the hide in which the man had wrapped himself. The hide had frozen, so the man could not move. "When it came day," Banta reports the man as saying, "and when they began to grit their teeth near my head, I fairly trembled with fear, and could not help saying 'suy'. The wolves would look all around, and not seeing anything, they would begin to eat on the frozen hide so close to my head I could almost feel their teeth clipping my ears." Eventually the wolves departed, the sun warmed the hide, and the man climbed out -- only to find that his horse had frozen to death.

By the 1870s the bison herds had been decimated by buffalo hunters, who were encouraged by General Phil Sheridan to continue their work until every last "shaggy" was dead. In this way the "Indian problem" would be resolved, since the Plains Indians depended on the bison for survival. When the Texas legislature considered a bill to protect the bison, Sheridan advised against it. "Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated," he said. "Then your prairies can be covered with...cattle." The killing and skinning and selling continued, and by 1878 the Texas bison herds were no more. After men like Banta and his companions had wiped out the buffalo, the wolves were forced to find new prey. Out of necessity they turned their attention to cattle.

The Texas longhorn was capable of defending itself from predators like the wolf. When wolves moved in, longhorns formed a protective circle around their calves. The cry of a calf or cow beset by wolves would bring other longhorns converging on the scene with, as one observer wrote, "wild and angry" looks. Bulls locked in combat might attract an audience of wolves, who would sit by and watch the proceedings in the hope that the loser would be so injured that it became easy prey. It wasn't until stockmen introduced Herefords onto the open range in Texas that the real problems with wolf predation began. Unlike the longhorn, the Hereford was no match for a wolf pack.

"Of all predators which prey on our herds and flocks," wrote Judge O.W. Williams of Pecos County in 1908, "the lobo inflicts the most damage, and causes stockmen the most trouble." In fact, summer droughts and winter blizzards caused more livestock losses than wolves, but cattlemen couldn't control the weather. They could control wolves, however, and set about doing so with great vigor, experimenting with a variety of methods. Cattle baron Charles Goodnight's wife Mary, in discussing life on the Goodnight Ranch for an article that appeared in a 1901 issue of The Ladies Home Journal, wrote: "We have deer and antelopes, and did have wolves, taming the latter with the idea that we might employ them to decoy wild brethren within gunshot; but the domesticated ones became such a nuisance that we killed them." Other ranchers used wolfhounds. So did a Texas Ranger named Tannerey, who claimed his dogs killed many a wolf in the Texas Panhandle. Tannerey's wolfhounds, however, proved no match for one of the most famous of the outlaw wolves, Lobo, the King of Currumpaw, who for many years frustrated every attempt made by ranchers in northern New Mexico to end his career. Tannerey boasted that he would take Lobo's scalp, and set out to find the outlaw's pack. Find them he did, and turned his wolfhounds loose. Lobo and his packmates separated, forcing the dogs to split up, too. When the wolves reunited, some of the dogs failed to appear, and the wolves led by Lobo turned on the remainer and killed or severely injured the hounds. Tannerey gave up his quest.

Texas had its share of famous outlaw wolves. In the 1920s the White Lobo frustrated every attempt by wolfers to trap her. Montie Wallace, foreman of the Downie Ranch in Pecos County, decided to try collecting the $500 bounty placed on the White Lobo's head. "I trapped and trapped," said Wallace. "I could never understand why I had no success in catching the white wolf." One day Wallace was riding through a canyon when the White Lobo suddenly stood up less than thirty feet away. The trapper figured that the wolf was deaf, or it would have heard him approach and slipped away unseen. Wallace dismounted and fired his rifle twice. The first bullet killed the White Lobo, but it took the second bullet to knock her down. Not only was she deaf but she had no sense of smell, either -- that was why Wallace had been unable to catch her with his baited traps.

On the XIT Ranch, 150,000 head of cattle grazed a three million-acre range, and the ranch owners paid a bounty of $5 to $10 to cowboys who succeeded in killing a wolf. Some hands were given wolf-hunting assignments during the winter months. Ranchers calculated that a wolf killed about 75 head of cattle a year. Wolves quickly learned not to return to a kill for a second feeding, as they would have done under normal circumstances. Most cowboys carried bottles of strychnine in their saddlebags, with which they laced any cow carcass they discovered, hoping the wolves would come back and strip every bit of meat from the bones. As a result, wolves modified their behavior and ate only from fresh kills -- bringing down far more cattle than they would have otherwise.

The XIT wolfers usually tried to ride the wolves down. They knew that for the first few miles of the chase a wolf could easily outrun a horse, so the cowboys settled their mounts into a "long lope," keeping the wolf on the move until it tired. These pursuits often lasted for 10 or 15 miles. In one instance a cowboy had to chase a wolf 25 miles. At the end of the chase the cowboy would either shoot the wolf or rope it and drag it to its death. They also searched for dens in the early spring, killing all the pups in a litter. In this way the XIT men accounted for about 200 wolves in the late 1890s, and killed the last wolf on the ranch in 1916.

Public and private bounties ranging from $10 to $50 were a factor in significantly reducing gray wolf numbers in Texas by 1905. Increasingly, attention was turned to the red wolf. Vernon Bailey, who worked for the U.S. Biological Survey (USBS) to determine the best way to eradicate the wolf, reported in 1907 that few people attempted to raise sheep in East Texas because there were too many wolves. (Ironically, the Mexican wolf, C.l. baileyi, is named for Bailey.) In a 1915 U.S. Senate debate on funding wolf control projects, it was reported that the state of Texas paid $88,930 in bounties in one year. That didn't include the bounties paid by counties and livestock associations. The 1920 USBS annual report stated that the "wolf situation is one that will require intensive organized effort until the last animal is taken" in a number of states, including Texas. By 1928, the USBS had 500 men doing predator control in nine federal districts, one of which was Texas.