Coleman - Vicious: Wolves and Men in America

Published with assistance from the income of the Frederick John Kingsbury Memorial Fund.

Copyright 2004 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by Rebecca Gibb. Set in FontShop Scala and Scala Sans by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley & Sons.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coleman, Jon T., 1970
Vicious : wolves and men in America / Jon T. Coleman.
p. cm.(Western Americana series)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 0-300-10390-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. WolvesUnited StatesHistory. I. Title. II. Yale Western Americana series.
QL737.C22C62 2004
599.7730973dc22
2004000176

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Annie

I WISH I could trace my fascination with wolves to an event worthy of a good story. Perhaps a tale about a bite from a beast on a moonlit forest path, followed by years of feverish research and writing as the canine obsession grew in my blood. Alas, this book emerged from a mundane insight, not rabid inspiration. One day, sitting at my computer, I looked away from the screen and realized that I was surrounded by animals. A whale swam on my coffee mug, a monkey waved from a birthday card, and a cat figurine lounged atop the computer monitor. A quick count of the animal images and effigies in the apartment yielded 113 beasts. The place was a representational ark, and I had barely noticed as the menagerie filed in.

I began to look for animals in other places. As a history graduate student with my eyes fixed on books, documents, and microfiche most of my waking hours, I tried to spot animals in the mountains of text. I found them everywhere. Real and imagined beasts surrounded the Euro- and Native American humans at the center of my research. The history of the colonization of North America was an animal history, and no creature prompted as much discussion or fired as many imaginations as wolves.

Wolves popped up in town records, legislative journals, personal correspondence, and local histories. The evidence was fragmentarya reference here, a quip therebut as the snippets piled up, a story took shape far bigger and more interesting than even I, an animal fancier, could have anticipated.

The wolf documents betrayed the historical circumstances of their production. When I read in a wolf bounty certificate from colonial New England that Ezekiel turned in a severed wolfs head to his town selectman for a promissory note worth three pounds, the Old Testament name and the payment scheme indicated the transactions antiquity. And when the selectman nailed the canines bloody skull to the side of the towns meetinghouse for the residents to ponder and admire, the fissure separating the dead Puritans world-view from my own opened like a gaping maw. Yet, while rooted in the eras of their making, the wolf documents also migrated across time periods. The same wolf legends and wolf hunting rituals appeared in diverse locales and epochs. Wolves seemed both embedded in time and free to roam through it.

Tracking wolves through the documents of their eradication brought me to paths that led both into and out of history. Wolves raised questions whose answers opened new routes into well-mapped times and places. Why did colonial New Englanders fasten wolf heads to the structures that embodied their civic and religious communities? Gory and flamboyant, these decorations challenged the Puritans reputation for somberness. Yet even as wolves tempted me to delve deeper into a particular historical situation, the animals pulled me away from the study of the past as I knew it. Beasts steeped in myth and symbol, wolves existed in the realm of folklore as well as that of history. While a disciplinary cousin, folklore worked on scales of time and space far broader than those of history. Folklorists possess different evidentiary standards, and they operate according to a different set of assumptions. Historians, for example, seek to explain change, while folklorists try to understand why some cultural artifactsstories, songs, jokes, and dancesresist change. Wolves connected history and folklore, revealing how timeframes and disciplines interact, and the complementary ways that history and folklore track change.

And the wolves trail carried me still farther from my academic home. A history of animals demands some reckoning with biologya subject I had successfully avoided since sophomore year in high school. Comprehending wolves behaviors, social structures, communication systems, and ecological relationships forced me to wrestle with the language and epistemology of the life sciences. Wolf howls, for example, chilled the spines of Euro-American colonists from Maine to Montana. Colonists proclaimed the yowls haunting, devilish, foreboding. Engrossed in the projects of livestock raising and territorial conquest, Euro-American settlers were poor listeners. In post-World War II United States and Canada, better listeners asked new questions about wolf howls. Instead of trying to determine what the howls meant to them, wildlife biologists wondered what the songs meant to wolves. It turned out that the species talent for long-distance communication was critical to the maintenance of pack territories. Their songs acted as an early warning system, keeping rival groups from needless confrontations as they moved through overlapping territories in search of food. Instead of fiendish messages from the heart of darkness, wolf howls were a brilliant solution to a predators dilemma. They helped packs concentrate their energies on the acquisition of more energy rather than the elimination of each other.

Listening to wolf howls through history alone distorts the past. It allows humans to hold tight to the fallacy that the universe revolves around them. Wolves had their own reasons for singing. Euro-American livestock owners overheard a conversation intended for furrier ears and used the misinformation they gathered to persecute the howlers. The story of wolves combines biology, folklore, and history, and this story can be told only by melding the techniques, the concerns, the triumphs, and the shortcomings of several disciplines. The result is still history, but history altered in structure and portent by its exposure to biology and folklorean interdisciplinary mutant.

Human beings have never been fond of mutants. Throughout history, people labeled creatures that crossed boundaries, mixed classes, and bewildered categories unclean and dangerous. Yet mutants represent one of the most creative biological forces on earth. A mutation occurs when the copying of genetic material from one generation to another goes awry. The imperfect copy may wind up crippled or disfigured, but she may also acquire a physical attribute that enhances her life and the lives of her offspring. Mutation can be a blessing as well as a curse. Genetic accidents help drive evolution, adding to the spectacular diversity of living beings on this planet.

Including animals as equal partners in American history triggers a mutation. History becomes something else, a story in which perspectives, disciplines, timeframes, and types of evidence mingle. The result may be a freak, but I am convinced it is a blessed one.

I WROTE this book in the dark mostly. Hauling myself out of bed at five every morning to lay down a few sentences before more important duties changing diapers, grading papers, folding laundryseized my attention. I live in Indiana and writing in the morning is easy here in the summer. However, as the leaves fall and the ground freezes, an enfolding gloom turns the wee hours grim. Most of Indiana is in the same time zone as Maine, but it gets the sun about an hour later; in winter the morning darkness lingers like a drunk uncle after Thanksgiving dinner. I endured these black hours, with a little help from Abe, my basset hound, whose thimble-sized bladder roused him and me every morning, because I enjoy what I do. I like writing history, and I have a lot of people to thank for helping me discover and nourish an affinity strong enough to defeat the call of a warm bed on cold mornings.