Wolves in Native America:
Historical records of the wolf legends of American Indians, the native peoples of North America, show that the wolf was revered, probably because of its devotion to its family and its pack - a devotion which parallels the relationship between an Indian and his tribe. Because native peoples, like wolves, defended territory and hunted and killed to survive, they admired the wolf's prowess in doing so. The wolf's survival skills spawned many Indian legends, including the Eskimo story of Qisaruatsiaq, an abandoned old woman forced to survive on her own. She eventually turned into a wolf. Many tribes most revered pure white wolves, ascribing them incredible powers.
The Sioux name for wolf is shunk manitu tanka , the "animal that looks like a dog but is a powerful spirit." A number of native American tribes had medicine men who donned wolf skins in order to duplicate the powers of the wolf. One such was the Kwakiutl wolf dancer. His mask, made to look like the head of a wolf, was constructed of wood and bone.
The two tribes that identified most strongly with the wolf were the Pawnee and the Cheyenne. The Pawnee identified so closely with the wolf that their hand signal for wolf was the same as the hand signal for Pawnee. Other tribes referred to them as the Wolf People. To the Pawnee, the appearance and disappearance of the Wolf Star (Sirius) signaled the wolf coming and going from the spirit world, running down the bright white trail of the Milky Way, which they called the Wolf Road. Canada's Blackfoot Indians also called the Milky Way the Wolf Trail or Route to Heaven. The Pawnee, Hidatsa, and Oto Indians all had wolf bundles, pouches of wolf skins that guarded treasured bits of feathers and bone used in magic and ceremony. Cheyenne medicine men rubbed wolf fur on arrows to bring them good fortune in hunting.
Cherokee Indians would not kill a wolf. They believed that the brothers of the slain wolf would avenge its death and the weapon used for killing the wolf would not work again unless it underwent exorcism by a medicine man. They sang a song and walked in imitation of the wolf to protect their feet from frostbite.
The Nootka Indians of the Pacific northwest had a ceremony in which it was pretended that the son of the Chief was killed and brought back to life by Indians wearing wolf robes and wolf-head hats. The ceremony reinforced the close spiritual ties they believed they had with the wolf. Other Pacific Indians had similar beliefs. The Niska of British Columbia had four principle clans: Raven, Wolf, Eagle, and Bear. Both the Tlingit and Tsimsyan Indians of coastal British Columbia used wolves as characters on totem poles, believing wolves to be gods. British Columbia's Bella Coola Indians refused to eat the bear but they respected the wolf so much that when a bear was killed and its hide removed, a song was sung to the wolves to invite them to eat.
The North American Indians mentally became wolves through animist societies. The Arapaho had a wolf division. The Caddo had a wolf band. Montana's Crow Indians had a Crow Wolf Society whose members draped themselves in wolf skins prior to hunting. The Cheyenne wolf soldiers were the best known of all Indian wolf societies. They were fierce fighters dreaded by settlers and white soldiers alike.
The Mandan wore wolf tails on their moccasins as a badge of success in battle. Assiniboine Indians wore white wolf skin caps into battle for luck. Hidatsa women experiencing difficult childbirths rubbed their stomachs with wolf skin. Some tribes believed that killing a wolf would cause the big game to disappear. This view was completely opposite to that of some modern hunters. Alaska's Ahtena Indians propped up dead wolves and their tribe's shamans ceremoniously fed the wolves meals.
It was common for Indians to interpret natural history in terms of wolf behavior. A number of tribes thought that the wolf howls after eating in order to invite scavengers such as birds and rodents to come and eat. Many tribes believed that wolf howls were the cries of lost spirits trying to return to Earth. Many Plains Indians expressed the four cardinal points in terms of animals. The bear represented the west, the mountain lion the north, the wildcat the south, and, the wolf stood for the east. The Cree believed that heavenly wolves visited the earth when the northern lights shone in winter. Of the hundreds of recorded Indian wolf legends, one of the best known is the Cree story of the Earth-Maker Wolf and the creation of the world.
While all the land was covered with water, the trickster Wisagatcak pulled up some trees and made a raft. On it, he collected many kinds of animals swimming in the waters. The Raven left the raft, flying for a whole day, and saw no land, so Wisagatcak called Wolf to help. Wolf ran around and around the raft with a ball of moss in his mouth. The moss grew, and earth formed on it. It spread on the raft and kept on growing until it made the whole world. This is how the earth was created.
Baltic Wolves:
The wolf's glittering eyes caused it to be associated with celestial events such as comets, lightning, the full moon, and falling stars. These events were thought to increase the wolf's natural ferocity and strength tenfold and awaken psychic and other worldly forces within him. If a wolf came across amber he was believed to sniff the stone in order to receive power and enter into a mystical communication with astral forces.
The Ghost Wolf and Snowdrift:
In long-gone days of Montana two of these magnificent predators proved so adept at avoiding hunters and so skilled at feeding upon man's domestic stock as to become enshrined in the state's myth and folklore. So infamous had these two wolves become, that they were nearly accorded the attention given to such human predators and anti-heroes as the James Gang, the Youngers or the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. The press referred to these wolves as "outlaws," while the government and stockgrowers' organizations offered rewards to the bounty hunter who could bring them in. Indeed, if one were to give in to the temptation to attribute human emotions to animals, it would seem that these two wolves had declared war on the stockmen who had been the driving force behind their species' near extinction. These two wolves who simply failed to surrender to man's superior technology, who refused to recognize that there was no longer a place for their kind in Montana, achieved such notoriety as to be given names. The first of these outlaws was known as the Ghost Wolf, the second was called Snowdrift.
According to local lore, the Ghost Wolf was first sighted in the Judith Basin Country in 1915. The Ghost Wolf's home range stretched from Highwood Mountains to the Little Belt Range, an area of some million acres. It was in 1920 the Ghost Wolf turned outlaw and began raiding the ranches of the Judith Basin, pulling down cattle, sheep, and horses at will. By the mid-1920s, so feared and famed had this prairie pirate became that the Associated Press began to run stories on the Ghost Wolf of the Judith Basin, while local ranchers offered a $400 reward for his capture--Wanted Dead or Alive. And so ensued and wolf-hunt that would rival that of any man-hunt in annuls of the Old West. Traps were set, poison bait were scattered across the length and breadth of Central Montana. Possies were formed to bring the outlaw wolf to "justice." Men hunted the Ghost Wolf on horse back, foot, and snowshoes; from automobiles and airplanes, all to no avail. For ten years the Ghost Wolf evaded the best that man had to throw against him. Some sources estimate that all told the Ghost Wolf killed nearly two thousand head of livestock the during the "Roaring Twenties." In May 1930 the Ghost Wolf finally met his end. Al Close, a rancher in the Little Belts, with the aid of Mike, a red Irish terrier, and Nick, a black and white sheep dog, tracked down and shot the Ghost Wolf.
A near contemporary, both in chronological and geographical terms, of the Ghost Wolf was Montana's second great outlaw wolf, Snowdrift. Although the Snowdrift Wolf's home range also included the Little Belt Mountains and Judith Basin, at times, this great predator roamed across the Missouri and into the Bear Paw Mountains. Having lost one toe on his left paw in a trap, Snowdrift, a large light-colored male, left a distinctive calling card in the form of his three-toed track, at some 1,500 kill-sites during his career as a stock killer. Snowdrift first began to exact his toll from Montana's stockgrowers in 1900, it is estimated that by the time of his death in 1923 his predation had cost local ranchers over $30,000 in stock losses. After eluding the usual possies for well over a decade, Snowdrift was finally ran to ground in the Highwood Mountains in May 1923 by Don Stevens, a government hunter, and Stacy Eckert, a US Forest Ranger. Stevens and Eckert succeeded in snaring Snowdrift in a leg-trap. Catching the old outlaw in a trap did not, however, mean that this terror of plains would meekly surrender and await his fate. Snowdrift wrenched his trap free from its anchor and for days, with his front paw still clenched in the steel jaws of the trap, managed to elude his pursuers. Finally, after four long days Snowdrift was cornered and shot.
Umm...Riiiiight...
Jim Bridger was fond of telling a tale of an encounter with wolves in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. It was in 1829 as Bridger was setting his beaver traps that he was jumped by a pack of wolves. Bridger ran for his life and managed to climb to safety in nearby tree. After milling about for a while, all the wolves but one, who stayed behind as a guard, departed. In an hour or so the pack returned with a beaver which they forced to fell Bridger's tree. When queried as to what happened next, the old mountain man replied, “Why they ate me of course.”
