Ep. 37: The Wolf Returns to the West | The American West
episodePreviously titled “Ep. 37: The Wolf Returns to the West” — renamed by the publisher on Sep 15, 2026
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at phelpsgamecalls.com the return of gray wolves mexican wolves and red wolves to the west is an unfolding history yet to play out but it's a watershed in the western story i'm dan flores and this is the american west
The Wolf Returns to the West. Stepping ashore in the early 1600s, we old-worlders were bitter to discover wolves were abundant in America. That's truly curious if you know human history. Since thousands of generations of us had watched and learned from wolves for half a million years or more, Domesticated wolves were our first companion animals, our oldest animal helpmates, our templates for domestication, because as hunters, both humans and wolves saw so much of themselves in the other. But there were handed down memories that were more recent. In Eurasia, wild wolves ceased to be our blood brothers when 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, we started taming and herding ungulates. Native people in America never took that step with bison or bighorn sheep or pronghorns, and consequently they lived among wolves without animus, continuing to admire and learn from them, seeking them as totems.
But Europeans landed in America with all their past centuries of wolf hatred at full boil, plus a recent memory of success at eradicating wolves in places like the British Isles. There was also that shepherd's religion we brought with us, which calls something else into play. Inferences from the Bible were that wolves were a part of the fallen earth Adam and his progeny inherited when he was expelled from the garden. Looking deeply into a wolf's eyes could also be a disconcerting reminder of something good Judeo-Christians tried their best to avoid thinking about. To paraphrase the British ecologist Melanie Challenger, The earth was now dominated by an animal who was doing his best to convince himself and everyone else that he was not actually an animal.
That animal origin we share with wolves is one reason they make us so anxious. In his 1920s novel, Steppenwolf, the German writer Hermann Hesse put the matter this way. He calls himself part wolf, part man. With the man, he packs in everything spiritual and sublimated or even cultivated to be found in himself. And with the wolf, all that is instinctive, savage, chaotic. As a good European, Hesse didn't understand enough about wolves to reference their real emotional lives, their loyalty and tenderness to packs and mates and offspring. But he knew that wolves remind us of the animal nature we humans deny or believe we've escaped.
How did European settlers' attitudes lead to the near-eradication of wolves in the U.S.?
That was a problem for us, but much more of a problem for wolves. Except in Alaska... By the mid-20th century, we Americans had endangered all our wolves everywhere. Federal wolf killers Stanley Young and E.A. Goldman's famous book, The Wolves of North America, proudly proclaimed victory by the 1940s. By then, wolves were entirely gone in the east from New England to Virginia. The Rocky Mountain states, with all their public lands, barely held 100 wolves. California's last wolves were down to fewer than 50. There were only 60 Mexican wolves left in the southwest. The only places in the lower 48 that still had sizable wolf populations were the upper Great Lakes country and the mid-south. By the mid-20th century, the upper Midwest still had 1,400 gray wolves and the mid-south 450 red wolves.
But those numbers were all quickly falling. For Americans born after World War II, living in a country without wolves now became normal. That was certainly the case for me. From a generation born in an America with no wild buffalo on the prairies, no passenger pigeon in the skies, no wolves in the forest, the wolf warriors were finally succeeding in making America over in the image of England or France.
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