| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Vicious: Wolves and Men in America. By Jon T. Coleman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xv + 270 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $28.00.
Wolves have never, as far as we know, killed a human in North America. Yet American colonists and pioneers not only slaughtered them at every chance, but devised torturous methods to do so. Vicious weaves together the "violent interactions" (p. 4) of biology, history, and folklore to find out why.	1
From New England's colonists, the Ohio Valley's settlers, and Utah's Mormon pioneers, to early 1900s federal predator control, Vicious reveals that stories about wolves were not about wolves per se, but instead used wolves for ulterior motives: to assert dominance in a new land that was frighteningly unknown and inhospitable, to force the familiar upon an unfamiliar place, to define and condone individual bravado, even to justify funding for government agencies. Colonization was chaotic and disappointing; wolf legends, community hunts, and aggressive torture were used to bring things back into human control. Euro-Americans became "a predator that imagined itself prey attacking a predator that could not imagine itself prey" (p. 230).	. . .

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