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World Champion Wolfer

Enter the executioner, Big Bill Caywood

By Tom Wolf

Wolves are returning to Colorado, whether the federal government likes it or not. Some think wolves have already returned to the San Juan Mountains. A little history of conservation efforts of the past pits man against nature . . .

Who killed the last wild wolf in Colorado? What kind of man would do such a thing? The answer is important, no matter how you feel about the return of the wolf. Citing sources in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service - today's bureaucratic successor to the old Bureau of Biological Survey (BBS) - the Denver Post said the deed was done in 1935. Wolf advocates Michael Robinson and Rob Edward hold to 1945. Who is correct?

The person in the best position to know was Denver writer and conservationist Arthur Carhart (1892-1978). In 1929, Carhart published Last Stand of the Pack, his account of the extermination of the last wolves in Colorado. Carhart's co-author was BBS biologist Stanley Young, who ran the federal program designed to kill every last wolf in the state, regardless of cost or effects on other creatures. Their book brings us face to face with an old female, infamous around Greenhorn Mountain, the peak in southeast Colorado named after Comanche warrior Cuerno Verde. "Now, in 1923, the Greenhorn Wolf ranged alone. SHE WAS DESTINED TO BE THE LAST NATIVE RENEGADE GRAY WOLF IN COLORADO."

Enter the executioner, Big Bill Caywood. "It was fitting that big Bill Caywood, the craftiest, the most learned of all wolfers in the Rockies, should ring down the curtain on this tragedy of the gray wolf killers," wrote Carhart. "No other man of modern days has ever equaled his knowledge of the big gray." Caywood poisoned the Greenhorn Wolf on Christmas Day, 1923. But was that the end?

Not exactly. The lives of the wolf and the wolfer intertwined. And they both answered to Stanley Young, chief of the BBS Division of Game Management from 1934 -1938. An earlier scene opens in Young's office in Denver, where officials of the BBS and Colorado Stockmens Association sit smoking cigars. One of the cattlemen says to Young: "I've boasted that whenever we've asked for help from this office, within forty-eight hours there would be a Survey hunter on the trail of any killer wolf . . . Caywood's the man. He knows more about wolves than they know about themselves. He thinks like a wolf, only more so."

Big Bill Caywood had been an independent wolfer in northwestern Colorado before joining the BBS in 1915. In 1912 and 1913, Caywood killed 140 wolves, for which the local stockmen paid him $50 per head. "Big-shouldered, slightly stooped, not quite bowlegged but evidently a rider of cowland trails, Caywood represents the type of frontiersman that put much of the work into the winning of the western wildernesses."

A rancher asked Caywood what he's going to do when all the wolves are gone. Caywood said he didn't know, but he couldn't live in the city: "I've just got a lot of love and respect for the gray wolf. He's a real fellow, the big gray is. Lots of brains. I feel sorry for him. It's his way of livin'. He don't know better. And I feel sorry every time I see one of those big fellows thrashin' around in a trap bellowin' bloody murder . . . Guess I'm too much a part of this outdoors to hold any grudge against animals . . . It's part the way that wolves go after poor defenseless steers, murder does and fawns and drag down bucks that helps me go out and bring them in."

Ambivalence stalks Caywood in another death scene: "You poor old devil!" cried Bill huskily as he stooped to the dying wolf. "You poor, lonely old murdering devil!"

The demise of the wolf also had consequences for the wolfer. Caywood wrote Carhart in 1930 to say how much he liked the book that made him famous. In 1935, thanks to Young, Carhart alerted Caywood to rumors of a "pack of old buffalo lobos running over toward the Big Salt Wash and the Cathedral Bluffs area. I told him then if they were genuine lobos and you were going to be sent, I wanted to go along if it was OK with you." By that time, Young was rising to the top of the BBS back in Washington, DC. But the BBS had other ideas. They forced Caywood to retire. "No one will hire a crippled old man," Caywood told Carhart.

Young stood firm but both Caywood and Carhart changed their minds over time about the wolf. Carhart told Mary Austin, "My sympathy too was with the old renegades; and I think the hunters felt somewhat the same way. Personally, I feel that we are floundering dangerously and ridiculously with our wildlife. . . . A lot of so-called conservation is bunk."

Tom Wolf is the author of Arthur Carhart:Wilderness Prophet, published by the University Press of Colorado