"Wolves can help Americans understand and integrate their past by bringing together divergent people and places across the reaches of space and time."

Terms of Dismemberment
Jon T. Coleman

The conquest of New England teaches many lessons, but three stand out in regard to wolf heads. First, the eradication of wolves involved a tangled cast of species and cultures. Second, wolves died for their role as ambiguous symbols in human conflicts as well as for their predation of livestock. Finally, wolf heads remained potent icons because wolves survived in southern New England for over a century despite the colonists’ best efforts to destroy them. Evasion–a maneuver that grew ever harder to perform as English colonists drained swamps and converted forests into fields–was the key to animals’ endurance.

In New England, wolves, colonists, and Native Americans never assembled the elements necessary to share an ecological niche. Rival predators need space, calories, and clear lines of communication to live together in peace. Colonists imported a food supply (cows, pigs, sheep) that invaded their neighboring predators’ territories. Unable to impress upon their niche-mates the importance of not eating property, the colonists offered rewards to one rival (Native Americans) to hunt the other (wolves).

Wolf killing gave the human predators a set of symbols that helped mitigate their communication difficulties, but the bipeds’ alliance shattered on the ground beneath their feet. Unlike wolves, the Algonquians inhabited landscapes–cleared fields and villages–colonists adored. The English bought, stole, and negotiated for Indian land, yet they struggled to convince the Algonquians to respect and adhere to their notions of property. The human predators fought over plots of land as well as the rules for creating, maintaining, and transferring territory. Each tried to invent symbols of power that signaled their control over cultural definitions as well as physical resources. Wolf heads represented one such token. The Algonquians and the English wrestled over the heads’ interpretation, one predator insisting the craniums embodied fealty and submission, the other equality and reciprocity. In colonial New England, language, land, and domestic beasts trapped three top predators in a pit of violence and misunderstanding and only one escaped to continue its journey.

As folkloric beasts and enthusiastic molesters of private property, wolves loped through the breadth of American history. They provide a historical bridge far more sturdy than the concepts scholars lay down to span the gaps in the past. Cobbled together ethnic identities like Euro-American or abstract processes like colonization often fail to make the linkages they imply. Were the ranchers who settled Montana’s grasslands engaged in the same conquest as the farmers who plowed rocks in Connecticut? Does the term Euro-American mean anything when people as diverse as John Winthrop and Chad McKittrick fall into the category? Historians work to come up with synthetic concepts that sew together vast time periods and address the continent’s past as a whole. The prime lesson of wolf history is this: life and history create their own connections. Genes bind generations; folktales cross thousands of miles; and wolves integrate the American past through the synthesis of biological, folkloric, and historical time.

Wolves can help Americans understand and integrate their past by bringing together divergent people and places across the reaches of space and time. And historians might be able to assist wolves in return. The best reason for letting wolves repopulate the United States may be historic rather than ecological. Wolves may heal ecosystems overrun with herbivores; they may bring a sense of wildness to national parks; their presence may even brighten the human soul. But wolf reintroduction will most certainly preserve a species that unites Americans through a long, brutal, and vital colonial past. Americans spend millions of dollars to safeguard historic treasures and monuments. Tax dollars, foundation grants, and visitor donations safeguard the Constitution, polish the Vietnam Memorial, and keep Richard Nixon’s birthplace from crumbling to the ground. Wolves tell a story longer than any nation’s, larger than any war’s, and more significant than any president’s. They push history beyond the confines of humanity to include the creatures and biological processes that shaped the past. Wolves are living reminders of the legacies of colonization, and, when the likes of Chad McKittrick shoot the animals to possess their skulls, the rituals and symbols of colonization thunder back from the distant past to enliven wildlife debates in postmodern America. The predators continue to fire imaginations, ignite controversies, and illicit savage behavior, and their grip on American culture remains fierce. They embody an unbroken history of conquest worth pondering and protecting.

Further Reading:

R-10’s death is recounted in Thomas McNamee, The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone (New York, 1997). For the public display of wolf heads see The Early Records of the Town of Providence, vol. 9 (Providence, 1893); Joshua Coffin, A Sketch of the History of Newburry, Newburryport, and West Newburry (Boston, 1845). For the naming of Wolf-Trap Hill see Thomas Weston, History of the Town of Middleboro Massachusetts (Boston, 1906). Examples of colonists calling Indians animals can be found in John Underhill, Newes From America (London, 1638); Letter from Reverend Solomon Stoddard to Governor Joseph Dudley, October 22, 1703, in New England Historical and Genealogical Register, XXIV, 269-270. For the display and meaning of human skulls in wartime New England see James Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676 (Amherst, 1999); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998). See Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643) for an account of Algonquian wolf trapping. For wolf head tributes see Edward Winslow, "Winslow’s Relation," in Alexander Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth from 1602 to 1625 (Boston, 1841); Glenn W. LaFantasie, ed., The Correspondence of Roger Williams, vol. 1 (Hanover, N.H., 1988).