War Against the Wolf: America's Campaign to Exterminate the Wolf

Among the first acts of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Bay Colony was to set a bounty on wolves: first a penny for a pelt, then four bushels of corn for a mere scrap of fur. Succeeding generations of Americans followed the Pilgrims' lead, until by the middle of the 20th century the wolf was driven to the verge of extinction nearly everywhere outside Alaska. Rick McIntyre, a seasonal park ranger at Denali, Yellowstone, and other wolf-populated areas, has spent years documenting the behavior of living wolves. Here he turns to the sad task of documenting America's destruction of the wolf, a legacy that we may finally be able to undo with the reintroduction of Canis lupus to the wild.