Delia D'Ambra

So by the Monday after he vanished, things were looking bleak.

A lot of people had made up their minds that he was probably dead and would likely never be found.

But some law enforcement officials weren't so quick to throw in the towel.

The local sheriff asked a few agencies in western Montana to help him keep looking, just in case Ellsworth had tracked the poachers he was looking for into Montana's boundary.

But just like all the efforts before, that endeavor led nowhere, and Ellsworth's whereabouts remained unknown.

A week after the disappearance, the Shoshone County Sportsman's Association offered up a $100 reward for information, which again, considering inflation, was a decent amount of money for the time.

The president of the Sportsman's Association told the press that if Ellsworth had been targeted simply because he was a game warden who was enforcing the law, that was unacceptable.

He emphasized that his organization would do everything it could to see poachers punished for violating gaming laws.

And if law enforcement ever did find Ellsworth's body and determined he'd been murdered, the president of the association said he'd see to it that the perpetrators were apprehended and turned over to authorities.

As time dragged on, the number of people involved in searching began to dwindle, and some local investigative agencies concluded that Ellsworth had likely succumbed to an injury in the wilderness.

There was a tiny glimmer of hope when a guy seen hitchhiking in Montana was suspected of possibly being Ellsworth, but it was quickly determined that man was not the missing game warden.

So in an attempt to entice anyone with information to come forward, Ellsworth's sister in Canada offered up her own $300 reward.

She set a time limit on it, though, and told the press that it was only good for 30 days.

Towards the end of September, other wardens from the Fish and Game Department had made it clear that they were not giving up on solving the mystery.

They expressed to the spokesman review that there were new clues in the case.

And there was.

Kind of.

Turns out, two weeks before Ellsworth vanished, he'd taken out a life insurance policy on himself worth approximately $3,000.

There's no reporting that goes into a lot of detail about this, so I don't think it was side-eyed as suspicious or anything.

I'd personally love to know a lot more about it, but we just don't have any further info.