13

Frontier Justice Predator Control

LAST AMONG THE TERRITORIES TO HOLD VIABLE POPULATIONS OF LARGE PREDATORY mammals, Alaska became a battleground over predator control. As a nearly intact ecosystem it also offered a chance to examine natural predator-prey relationships. Beginning in the 1930s the studies and disputes helped reverse traditional attitudes toward predators on the national level and, ultimately, in the far North as well. They helped move policy toward more enlightened utilitarianism and preservationist nonconsumptive values.

Alaska’s 1925 Game Law constituted “an Act to Establish an Alaska Game Commission to Protect Game Animals, Land Fur-bearing Animals, and Birds in Alaska, and for other Purposes.”¹ It “protected” the species considered most immediately useful to people: the game as food supply and object of sport hunting and the furbearers as a source of cash income. Six species held prominence among the inland wild game mammals: moose, caribou, Dall sheep, mountain goat, Sitka deer, and brown bear, the last acquiring a tenuous status between game animal and predator. Black bear joined the “big game” list in 1938. Among land furbearers, beaver and marten enjoyed the most insistent protection. Game and furbearers needed safeguarding against abuse and overexploitation by humans, as well as from predators. “Predators” meant animals, excepting the superpredator, who appropriated “game” and “furbearers” for themselves, thereby contesting humans for the resource. Predators needed to be “controlled,” a word interpreted by different people to mean everything from limited cropping to extermination. The law permitted the use of poison against wolves, coyotes, and wolverines, regarded as the most troublesome predators.

Predation existed from time immemorial, but it did not spur humans to action until it visibly impinged on their interests and until they felt capable of doing something about it. Such conditions might have applied to the valuable fur seals in the late 19th Century. Capt. A.W. Lavender, Treasury agent on St. George Island, depicted attacks by killer whales on fur seals in the 1880s. His journal entry for September 15, 1881, related, “A school of apparently 10 or 12 killers ran into the [swimming fur seals] around the near rookery to-day and soon made havoc among the pups. It was estimated from the manner in which the seal were thrown up out of the water that 20 or 30 were eaten by their greatest enemies.” Similar notations appeared through the decade. Writing to Henry W. Elliott, Lavender recommended that “this species of whale must be destroyed or the seal rookeries will be something of the past in a short time. . . . The next Congress should make an appropriation sufficient to furnish two whale boats and crews with all the modern implements for the killing of whales, and to . . . destroy this whale whenever an opportunity is afforded.”² Elliott endorsed the idea, although he may have differed as to who rated as the seals’ greatest enemy. Nevertheless, the government abstained from any systematic effort to suppress the whales.

As a government policy, predator control sprang primarily from Progressive Era conservation, which emphasized efficient management of natural resources to benefit the public. Long before the science of ecology demonstrated the beneficial roles of predators, scientists and the public considered them a threat to resource supplies analogous to thieves or murderers in the human social sphere. Progressive conservationists therefore expected the federal government to take the lead in suppressing predators. As agencies of the Department of Agriculture, the Division of Economic Ornithology (1886–1905) and its successor Bureau of Biological Survey (BBS) (1905–1940) oriented their concerns largely to the demands of farmers and ranchers. Accordingly, agency chief C. Hart Merriam initiated a program of prairie dog poisoning in 1901 to clear the way for cattle grazing in the West. In 1906 the BBS began functioning as an information center for state bounty systems, and a year later it supervised the killing of 1,800 wolves and 23,000 coyotes on national forest lands. By 1915 BBS fielded a well-organized and well-funded contingent of federal predator control officers.³

For several decades the BBS war against predators reflected the will of the people, most natural scientists, and even many nature writers. Antagonism toward “bad” or “immoral” species stemmed not only from competition for game and zeal for efficiency but also from the revulsion of humanitarians and others against cruelty and violence wrought by predators. It seemed obvious that getting rid of them would improve both wildlife abundance and justice. Among his lengthy list of villainous species, the respected William T. Hornaday regarded the wolf as a “black-hearted murderer and criminal” and the mountain lion an “intolerable pest” that “must be hunted down and destroyed regardless of cost.” Theodore Roosevelt termed the wolf “the beast of waste and desolation.” Few appreciated John Muir’s reverence for all creatures or his 1910 observation that plagues of jackrabbits in California had been caused by the elimination of hawks, coyotes, and other predators.⁴ Institutionalized in BBS policy, the anti-predator campaign devastated several species in the States before it lost the sanction of science and public opinion.

INITIATION OF ALASKA WOLF CONTROL

Wolves headed the predator list in Alaska. Bearing the burdens of old European fairy tales, a recent experience of persecution by livestock interests in the West, and the fear, resentment, and, perhaps, envy of the human mammal, wolves ran into trouble before the turn of the 20th Century. Commercial game hunters regarded the wolf as a threat to their business during the Gold Rush era. Trappers slew large numbers, using poison illegally to acquire fox furs. An unknown, perhaps substantial number of wolves died from diseases brought in by miners’ dogs.⁵ In his 1912 report to the secretary of the interior, Governor J.F.A. Strong complained, “In certain portions of southeastern Alaska deer have become very scarce as a result of the depredation of wolves.” Calling for a bounty, he made no mention of the slaughter and waste of deer by meat and skin hunters.⁶ Two years later fisheries official E. Lester Jones reported deer “rapidly disappearing on many of the islands. I observed a number of instances where the wolves had killed deer, and in others I saw specimens of deer that were thin because of the ceaseless chasing.”⁷ The territorial legislature placed a ten-dollar bounty on the wolf in 1915, although wardens had reported no decrease in game over the previous several years.⁸ In 1922 Governor Scott Bone declared, “Wolves and wolverines are ruthless destroyers of game and fur animals. Predatory and destructive by instinct, they are a menace to game life. The Territory has shown liberality in providing a bounty on wolves and this should be supplemented by the Federal Government in aid of the necessary extermination.”⁹

This “liberality,” accompanied by requests for federal funds, reappeared throughout the territorial period. Bald and golden eagles acquired bountied status in 1917, hair seals in 1927, coyotes (which entered Alaska in numbers around 1912–1915 and spread rapidly in the 1920s) in 1929, the Dolly Varden in 1931, and wolverines in 1953.¹⁰ Letters streamed in to the Game Commission calling for bounties on these animals, black and brown bears, hawks, falcons, owls, and ravens. A 1928 letter asked, “What are you going to do about coyotes? They have cleaned up everything here in this section, rabbits, grouse, local ducks, foxes and now ptarmigan and muskrats.” A 1935 letter from Cache lamented, “About all there is around here now is owls, chicken hawks, ravens and some eagles. There should be a bounty on them.” Except for bears, Alaskan writers expressed virtually no sympathy for predators. Trappers favored the bounties but objected to poison because it killed small furbearers in addition to targeted predators.¹¹ Bounties won popular approval not only as predator control but also as a source of income for hard-pressed local residents, particularly during the Depression.

Agent Alfred M. Bailey recommended to the BBS in 1921 that the wolf bounty be increased from $10 to $25. He requested that BBS hire trained predatory animal destroyers “to protect deer from wolves in the Southeast” while acknowledging that excess hunting had wasted the deer.¹² Catering to the powerful stock-raising interests, BBS had practiced wolf control in the States since 1907. It felt little compulsion to do so in Alaska prior to the 1940s, in part because of the heavy kill of wolves by poison during and after the Gold Rush era. Rising concern within Alaska, however, resulted in a $10,000 appropriation by the 1927 territorial legislature for the hiring of a “predatory animal hunter,” to be under the joint control of the governor and the Alaska Game Commission. Underwritten by territorial and later federal funding, R.K. Stewart, followed by Harlan P. Gubser, Frank Glaser, and others, operated in various regions of Alaska from 1927 through the late 1950s. Their work consisted primarily of instructing trappers in wolf and coyote trapping and poisoning techniques. The commission assigned additional personnel to the Southeast in the 1940s. It sought to protect traplines, reindeer herds, and deer and other game populations.¹³

Stewart reported in 1929 that wolves seriously menaced reindeer at St. Michael and big game in McKinley Park. Wolverines, he said, engaged in trapline robbery and property destruction. He offered an honest interpretation of his job: “All nature strives to keep uniform balance. . . . Man’s killing of the various so-called game animals tends to keep the balance tipped against them permanently. The only possible thing to do, therefore, other than enforcing game and fur laws, is to control the predatory animals.” BBS biologist Olaus Murie, who researched caribou in the 1920s, saw it differently: “The caribou’s greatest menace is not the wolf, not the hunter, but man’s economic developments, principally the raising of reindeer.” He suggested setting limits on reindeer grazing areas and avoidance of mixing the herds, which might alter the genetic purity of the caribou.¹⁴

DEFENSE OF PREDATORS

Predator control raised biological and ethical questions about the proper role of humans in relating to Nature. On either plane, viable policy called for a sound understanding of predator-prey ecology. But emotion and perceived short-term gain, not science, dictated policies toward predators well past the mid-20th Century. The beginnings of a sympathetic view of the wolf accompanied its scarcity and the passing of the frontier. Ernest Thompson Seton featured a wolf as the protagonist in his popular story “The King of Currumpaw: A Wolf Story” in 1894. Seton and some others based their nature writing on a degree of scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, large predatory mammals had almost no organized defense. The new Forest Service hired its first wolf killers in 1905, and BBS began field efforts culminating in its permanent predator program in 1915. The receipt of money from private groups and states encouraged BBS to elevate its predator control program to a top priority.¹⁵

By the mid-1920s the wolf and mountain lion had been actually or practically eliminated in nearly all their habitat in the contiguous United States. Relief for predators awaited the advancement of ecological science to dispel fears and deflate excessive claims of harm to prey species and economic loss to ranchers and sheepherders. Accumulating knowledge led to publication of the first ecology book in 1913. Aldo Leopold, teaching at the University of Wisconsin, coauthored the first text on ecologically based wildlife management in 1933. The BBS and its successor Fish and Wildlife Service, tied to their anti-predator clientele but staffed by some officers dubious of predator control programs, remained conflicted from within and without well past midcentury. The National Park Service, hosting swelling flocks of visitors looking for closeness to Nature, assumed the lead among national agencies by halting predator control in its parks in 1935.

Scientists’ objections to predator killing had begun to surface by the 1920s. Joseph Grinnell and other members of the American Society of Mammalogists confronted the BBS at the society’s 1923 meeting, accusing it of “modern poison warfare.” The society persisted as the main institutional adversary of the bureau’s policy for about three decades. The bureau responded by shifting its goal from extermination of predators toward more restrained forms of control. Some BBS leaders modified their attitudes, but field operations, driven by funding and ties to farming and ranching, carried on until their demise in the early 1970s. Most critics argued for an ecological view of predators, citing their useful functions in the balance of nature. A few such as Olaus Murie maintained that predators had a moral right to exist.¹⁶

Murie wrote a tactful memo in 1929 to his chief, BBS director Paul Redington, conveying some of the concerns of the agency’s critics. He asserted the existence of a dynamic, although not well understood, balance of nature. In a desirable balance, “[O]ur native animal life may be represented in a reasonable way in our woods and fields.” Regarding predators, “The public is more and more pleading for a place in our Nature scheme for our predatory animals. Unfortunately, a number of the sportsmen are not willing to sacrifice some of the ‘game.’. . . Many people, as you know, are advocating a certain balance between predatory species and the game, merely that the predatory animals may have some small place in our fauna.” Projecting a decline of sport hunting, Murie commented that “‘manliness’ is no longer acquired by the pursuit of game; it is too absurdly easy. ‘Sterling qualities’ must assuredly be gained in some other manner.”¹⁷ Wildlife appreciation would be the trend of the future, he predicted.

Murie gently suggested that the BBS change its priorities. In contrast to its excellent research work in some endeavors, he argued, the predatory animal division indulged in

constant effort to produce hatred . . . to kill offending creatures in a spirit of hatred, calling them “murderers,” “killers,” “vermin,” in order to justify our actions. . . . Glaring posters, portraying bloody, disagreeable scenes, urging some one to kill, are working against the efforts of our other selves, who are advocating conservation, appreciation of wild life. Stirring up any part of our population to kill in a spirit of hatred has no part in a government program.

Murie recommended concentrating on research rather than being “a policeman, a sort of handy man.” Other agencies needing wildlife data, he noted, had begun to look elsewhere.¹⁸ Murie’s prescient views would find wide acceptance 30 or 40 years later.

The BBS, Murie’s employer for more than a quarter-century, did not feel ready to adopt his views and declined to publish his studies. But the ecological perspective slowly gained ground. Aldo Leopold, once an enthusiastic killer of predators, co-founded the Wilderness Society in 1935. By the time of his death in 1948 his thinking had evolved to the position that humankind should act as a member of the natural community and had no right to arbitrarily kill other species. Animal rights philosophy, however, possessed weak prospects in a world of vested material interests. Ecological science began to take hold in the 1930s and 1940s, partly as a result of Leopold’s work. But rather than casting humans as citizens of the natural community, it moved toward management and control of complex ecosystems.¹⁹

Studies in Alaska furthered the science of predator-prey relationships. In 1941 Fish and Wildlife Service wildlife biologist Lawrence J. Palmer produced a report identifying fire, not wolves, as the prime cause of diminishing caribou herds in the interior. Fires tended to destroy lichens totally, and full recovery took decades. Overgrazing had an effect similar to fire.²⁰ Palmer’s study drew little attention. A 1952 survey by biologists A. Starker Leopold and F. Fraser Darling corroborated Murie and Palmer’s findings. “We seriously doubt that wolves have played any major role in the decrease of caribou which started far back when wolves were very scarce,” they said. Caribou attrition in the central region resulted from fires that destroyed the slow-growing lichens: “One fire easily could outdo the work of decades in protecting a local caribou population from man and wolves.” In the west coastal region they found reindeer overgrazing to be the main cause of the caribou’s downward trend as well as that of the reindeer itself. They also concluded that wolves did not significantly affect moose or deer populations. They did not flatly reject predator control, acknowledging that it might be a necessary means of restoring specific game populations. But they cautioned that excessive predator removal could create game overpopulation, exhausting the food supply and leading to parasitism, lowered fertility, starvation, and damage to the range.²¹

WOLVES IN McKINLEY PARK

Disagreement over the status of the wolf found its first national public expression in a lengthy quarrel centering on Mt. McKinley National Park. Wildlife protection, particularly for the Dall sheep herd, had been a prime rationale for the park; other national parks had been established for scenery or tourism. Notwithstanding the continuation of commercial meat hunting in McKinley Park until 1921, the sheep herd numbered in the thousands. Few wolves existed in the region, possibly because of the widespread use of poisons. But in the spring of 1929 and winter of 1932, heavy snows cut the sheep herd to 1,500. The National Park Service, although leaning toward an ecological view of predators as recommended by the American Society of Mammalogists and other scientists, felt increasing pressure to control wolves and coyotes in the park. Alaska’s governor George Parks, the legislature, congressional delegate Anthony Dimond, and the Alaska Sportsman and its allied outdoor sporting community all insisted on predator control. So did the Alaska Game Commission, most BBS officials, and the Camp Fire Club. A 1936 Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editorial demanded, “If Alaska is to preserve her game and fur animals she—with the aid of the federal government—must wake up and carry relentless warfare into the ranks of the enemy—not tomorrow but today—not at some convenient season but in this hour of emergency.” Like other Alaskan critics of the Park Service, the editors believed coyote and wolf predation in the park threatened game outside as well.²²

Highly vocal elements demanded wolf control but, as in other resource disputes in the territory, some silently held more moderate opinions. Hjalmar “Slim” Carlson, a Swedish immigrant who trapped alone on the fringes of McKinley Park for several decades beginning in 1924, viewed wolves sympathetically. Once he caught a beautiful black wolf by two toes in a trap. He tried to let it go but it seized his leg in its jaws, holding but not biting. He talked to the wolf, and it wagged its tail and made a whining sound. But he dared not approach it again and, reluctantly, decided he had to kill it. He did not favor bounties and refused to blame the wolves when the caribou herds receded in the 1930s. In his judgment, the caribou had migrated elsewhere.²³

McKinley Park officials occupied uncomfortable ground between National Park headquarters and Alaskan citizens. They monitored sheep and wolf populations in the park. They regarded wolf predation claims as exaggerated but shot a few wolves in an attempt to quiet the critics. A 1935 order, however, directed them to stop killing wolves. Superintendent Harry Liek wrote the Alaska Game Commission in 1936 relating the results of four surveys he had personally conducted. He had found the remains of sheep killed by wolves, but no evidence of an unusual number of wolves. Three sheep had been killed by coyotes, which Liek believed to be on the increase and a danger to the sheep. “The coyote,” in his estimation, “is an exotic animal, and we are endeavoring to eliminate coyotes.”²⁴

Support for the Park Service came from the American Society of Mammalogists, Ecological Society of America, New York Zoological Society, Boone and Crockett Club, Audubon societies, and prominent biologists including Olaus Murie. Responding to a Camp Fire Club critic in 1938, Assistant Park Service Director Arthur Demaray proposed that “if sheep, wolves and caribou have lived together for many thousands of years without one exterminating the other, then, other things being equal, there seems no reason why they cannot now.” In the future, he predicted, people would want to “see and hear a timber wolf in its natural state.” Nevertheless, to fend off the political assault, officials killed 37 wolves in the park between 1930 and 1938.²⁵

Battered by pugnacious opposition for nearly a decade, in 1939 the Park Service hired biologist Adolph Murie to study predation in the park. Adolph had assisted his brother Olaus in researching caribou in 1922–1923 and had completed a master’s degree and a PhD in wildlife ecology at the University of Michigan. During 1937–1939 he investigated coyote-elk predation in Yellowstone National Park. Applying more modern scientific methods than had Olaus, who carried out a similar study at Yellowstone a decade earlier, he nevertheless reached the same conclusion—that coyotes had no detrimental effect on the elk population. From April through October 1939 and April 1940 through July 1941, Adolph examined wildlife in McKinley Park. Based on this experience—a landmark study in predator-prey ecology—he judged, “It appears that wolves prey mainly on the weak classes of sheep, that is, the diseased, the young in their first year. Such predation would seem to benefit the species over a long period of time and indicates a normal predator-prey relationship in Mt. McKinley Park.” Few coyotes lived in the park, grizzlies ate mostly vegetation and carrion, and golden eagles, accused of taking young sheep, fed primarily on ground squirrels, he noted.²⁶

Murie’s book The Wolves of Mt. McKinley came out in 1944. It heartened naturalists, scientists who believed in ecosystem integrity, and National Park Service leaders. But critics of wolves in the park interpreted it as propaganda on behalf of the Park Service. Meanwhile, apparent shortages of game intensified demands for wolf control. Governor Ernest Gruening led a chorus picturing McKinley Park as a breeding ground for wolves that spread out to attack game elsewhere. They characterized wolf protection in the park as an egregious example of federal mismanagement of Alaska. The Park Service responded by sending Murie back to survey the sheep in August-September 1945. Murie found only 500. He recommended that 10 to 15 wolves be killed to help the sheep recover, and the Park Service agreed.²⁷

The alarmingly low sheep tally in 1945 and the buildup of sentiment for wolf control prompted a congressional hearing in 1946. At the urging of the Camp Fire Club, the House Committee on Public Lands debated a bill to require the secretary of the interior to act against predators in McKinley Park. Marshall McLean, chairman of the Camp Fire Club, reminded the committee that

it was the purpose and intent of those men who initiated this project to have the area set aside as a national park, to provide there a sanctuary and refuge for the home and breeding grounds of the game, in particular for the white mountain sheep and caribou, from which they could spread to the surrounding territories. . . . [T[his purpose has failed because of the predators which have moved into the area, and because of the refusal of the National Park Service to recognize this area as a refuge and sanctuary for these game animals.²⁸

Belmore Browne also spoke for the club. He pointed out that the enabling bill identified the park as a “game refuge” and opined that wolves did not qualify as game. To save the sheep, he argued, “a most terrific effort has to be made right away.” He recommended that professional wolfkillers be employed.²⁹ H. Bradford Washburn of the New England Museum of Natural History and James R. Clark of the American Museum of Natural History in New York both testified in firm support of the bill. Appended letters from the Boone and Crockett Club, former National Park Service director Horace M. Albright, and Alaska Game Commission game management supervisor Jack O’Connor concurred. O’Connor stated that “personally, I can see no place in the scheme of things for wolves in the future of game in Alaska.”³⁰

Notwithstanding the reduction of the sheep herd to 500, Murie had stated in his 1945 report that “in a national park, the objective is to preserve a piece of primitive nature where natural relationships may prevail.” Browne, who subscribed to the game refuge concept, energetically attacked Murie’s approach to park management: “[T]he only persons in America who could take an interest in Murie’s ideal would be a handful of biologists. It was on account of the Park Administrators being misled by these theories that the park has been depleted of its game.” To Murie’s hypothesis that predation benefited sheep by removing the weak, Browne replied that “the killing of the young . . . is, in reality, the race murder of the sheep of tomorrow—the slaughter of the species.” Browne speculated that fear instilled by being chased aggravated sheep losses. He rejected Murie’s positing of a beneficial balance of nature: “The only way that equilibrium will be obtained in the Mt. McKinley National Park is by the practical elimination of the wolf.”³¹

Further congressional hearings planned for 1947 did not take place, but a national debate on wolf policy evolved. Park Service officials organized a counteroffensive, writing articles and encouraging wolf sympathizers to back their position. Nearly every prominent conservation group objected to legislation requiring wolf control in the park. Living Wilderness articulated the ecological view, while Field and Stream and Outdoor Life featured primarily anti-wolf articles. Further debate within the Boone and Crockett Club caused withdrawal of its anti-wolf resolution and adoption of a neutral stance.

In August 1948 an inspection team visited McKinley Park. It included park superintendent Frank Been, full-time park biologist Adolph Murie, Camp Fire Club representative Belmore Browne, American Museum of Natural History director and Boone and Crockett member Harold Anthony, and Anthony’s friend Ralph Friedman. At the end of a ten-day survey the team signed a compromise statement approving wolf control pending recovery of the sheep herd. The Park Service reinstated control measures. Murie counted 1,200 sheep in 1951 and 1,500 in 1953. Sheep recovery and an aggressive federal wolf control program elsewhere in Alaska allowed the McKinley Park issue to fade away. Since 1930, at least 76 wolves had been killed in the park.³²

Realizing that wolves could become a tourist attraction that would dampen criticism without harming the ecology, the Park Service permitted Herb and Lois Crisler to film a wolf family in the park in 1952. To support the filming the service halted wolf control and never renewed it. Lois Crisler’s book Arctic Wild came out in 1956, portraying wolves sympathetically and in detail. The Disney film White Wilderness appeared in 1958, containing wolf footage by the Crislers. The film and book made decisive contributions to the changing image of the wolf.³³

Adolph Murie’s studies in Wyoming and Alaska advanced the science of ecology by providing some of the first quantitative data on relations between large predators and their prey. The emerging field of ecology put conservation groups and the National Park Service on firmer ground. Evidence that predators performed useful functions enabled their admirers to avoid reliance on unproven concepts of the “balance of nature” or attempts to persuade others to preserve predators because of their beauty or spiritual values. The Park Service renewed its commitment to protection of all species in McKinley Park, Katmai National Monument, and other park units.³⁴

ESCALATION OF WOLF CONTROL

Scientific assessments did little to diminish Alaskans’ devotion to predator control. Increased human population and hunting following World War II, and an apparent revival of wolf numbers, generated demands for an intensified predator control program. Four ungulate species received primary attention: moose, caribou, Dall sheep, and reindeer. Coyote numbers had plunged since 1940;³⁵ therefore, officials placed the dominant emphasis on wolf control. In the prevailing view, wolves needed to be thinned out to the point where they would no longer be a detriment to the meat supply. Virtually no conspicuous private individual or group in Alaska regarded wolves as valuable in their own right or as an integral part of an ecological balance. The negative image of the wolf had a firm hold in the legislature and the Alaska Game Commission. Describing his work in caribou country, predator control agent Frank Glaser declared that “wolves had overrun the country” and that a great herd of caribou “was being slaughtered. . . . I was waging war on the wolves, a war that began 38 years ago when I went to Alaska. For 17 of those years I was a government wolf hunter, and I figure I’ve personally accounted for over 500 of the killers.”³⁶ Frank Dufresne termed the wolf “the villain in Alaska’s pageant of life.”³⁷ Clarence Rhode’s official pamphlet on Alaskan wildlife stated that “wolves prey on the valuable big-game animals, except bears, and have contributed to the great decline of the caribou herds.”³⁸

Outdoor sporting interests generated strong momentum for action against wolves. Russell Annabel cited numerous instances of alleged wolf atrocities in his 1948 book, Hunting and Fishing in Alaska. In the Chickaloon-Knik district, “Everyone traveling through the mountain passes has reported finding the wolf-torn remains of sheep piled in the valley heads where the animals come in winter for browse. . . . The district has been reduced by wolves to a fifth-rate hunting ground.” Of moose in the Matanuska-Susitna range, “[E]ach returning guide, trapper, or hunter has reported finding anywhere from five to twenty carcasses indisputably killed by wolves.” On the north side of the Alaska Peninsula, “[T]rappers told me the heavy-antlered caribou are being ‘piled up in windrows’ by wolves.” Caribou migrations in Broad Pass near Mt. McKinley “were wiped out by wolves. Dotting the tundra flats and the willow thickets are the whitening bones and antlers of the grand animals that fell victim to the blood-lust of the packs.” As for the western mainland, “At Nome, officials of the Reindeer Service reported that virtually all the caribou along the rim of Bering Strait and the Arctic Sea have been killed by wolves and that the predators are now in a fair way to exterminate the reindeer.” Supervisor Sidney Rood told Annabel that during his eleven years of service, “[W]olves destroyed more than 1,000,000 reindeer, each of which had a wholesale value of $22.” Waterfowl also suffered according to Annabel: “At Unalakleet, on Norton Sound, gunners for years have complained that wolves were killing countless ducks, geese, and swan in the vast nesting grounds.” Annabel painted the game situation “as grim and sickening a composite picture of destruction, with nothing being done to prevent it, as a sportsman could imagine in a nightmare.”³⁹

Eskimos displaying reindeer killed by wolves, mid-1950s. By Maurice W. Kelly. Alaska Game Commission, 19th Annual Report, July 1, 1957 Thru June 30, 1958. Claims of heavy losses of reindeer added impetus to wolf control.

Not every commentator shared such an alarmist view of the situation. Returning from an inspection trip in 1946, Ira Gabrielson reported to the Fish and Wildlife Service that “everywhere I went people were talking about the decrease of the reindeer herds” and “wolves were widely blamed.” Seeking out those he thought better informed, Gabrielson noted that “they and others generally believed that poor herding and the reckless killing of the reindeer for dog food by the Eskimos were both more important factors than wolf predation in their reduction. Frank Glaser, the Service trapper, is very strong in this belief. . . . Some of the Eskimos and a few of the Indian Service employees expressed the same point of view, one or two quite enthusiastically.” Gabrielson termed wolf predation “a convenient alibi for carelessness and mismanagement” of the reindeer.⁴⁰

Annabel also fixed coyotes in his crosshairs. Clarence Rhode advised him that coyotes, not wolves, bore the main responsibility for the atrophy of Dall sheep herds. Annabel considered the coyote an even more formidable threat to nesting waterfowl. A chairman of Ducks Unlimited in Alaska told him in military terms that “the coyotes are spreading westward toward the mouths of the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. If they once get a foothold there, some of the finest duck-shooting grounds of America will be affected. In time they’ll cut off a good share of the western migration at its source, and then they’ll work north and raid the nesting areas of the ducks and geese that swing across Canada into the big Mississippi flyway.”⁴¹

Annabel demanded corrective action:

[T]he wolf menace to Alaska’s game exists throughout the territory and is past exaggeration. All woodsmen with whom I have discussed the matter believe that unless immediate and drastic steps are taken to control the predators, the sheep, moose, and caribou populations will soon be reduced to the point where Alaska’s great hunting grounds will be mediocre and their rich promise to the next generation of American hunters gone.

He shamed sport hunters for their “almost unbelievable apathy” and territorial and Washington legislators for failing in their duty. Pointing to an estimate valuing Alaska’s game at $300 million, he belittled the 1947 congressional budget item for predator control as grossly inadequate to “hire pilots and maintain airplanes for patrolling and aerial wolf hunting, and for hiring and training wardens and year-round wolfers.”⁴²

Responding to such appeals in 1948 and again in 1949, Congress made two $104,000 appropriations for Alaska. In September 1948 a Branch of Predator and Rodent Control set to work under the Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska. By 1950 the branch fielded nine agents.⁴³ A survey identified the areas of greatest apparent need: reindeer ranges on the Seward Peninsula, the Alaska Peninsula and Nelchina caribou herds, mountain sheep ranges in the interior, and Sitka deer habitat in the Southeast. Some of these ungulate populations had sunk to low levels. Relying on aircraft travel, agents spread poisoned seal blubber in open areas crossed by wolf or coyote trails. Alaska Game Commission agent Hosea Sarber had discovered in 1943 that small furbearers like mink and martens disliked the blubber, whereas wolves and coyotes loved it. This afforded the control effort a measure of selectivity.⁴⁴

Seal blubber cubes used in wolf control, ca. 1956. By J. Malcolm Greany. Alaska Game Commission, 18th Annual Report, July 1, 1956 Thru June 30, 1957. Each cube, dipped in seal oil and fish sauce to attract wolves, contained a pellet of strychnine.

Territorial Sportsmen, Inc., of Juneau participated actively and financially in wolf control in hopes of increasing the deer population in the Southeast. Maurice Kelly, a club member and director of the Predator Control Branch, wrote the group in 1951, “It does appear that the wolf pack on the Taku was wiped out as well as the three wolves ranging in the Dyea Valley. . . . I feel it was a very successful operation and one which I feel was possible only through the cooperation of your organization.”⁴⁵ Territorial funds supplemented federal funding beginning in 1953, appropriated through the endorsement of “most sportsmen’s clubs, farm organizations, women’s clubs, civic organizations and many individuals.”⁴⁶

Predator control agents and private wolf hunters employed three methods against wolves during the 1948–1960 period: strychnine-laced carcasses and blubber cubes, “getters” that fired cyanide into the victims’ mouths, and buckshot fired from light aircraft. Each method accounted for an approximately equal number of wolves and coyotes taken by agents.⁴⁷ Strychnine had the side-effect of poisoning foxes and other furbearers, although agents normally placed it on frozen lakes while bears hibernated. “Getters” used in the summer and early fall sometimes killed black bears, and an occasional wolf would run as much as a mile before dying. In 1951–1952, wolf and coyote control accidentally killed at least 70 furbearers in addition to 374 wolves and 57 coyotes (Table 13.1).⁴⁸

Wolves recovered from poison bait stations, ca. 1957. By J. Malcolm Greany. Alaska Game Commission, 18th Annual Report, July 1, 1956 Thru June 30, 1957. A storm of complaints from hunters and settlers about loss of game set off an intensive wolf control effort in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Shooting from aircraft normally involved a pilot, who flew over the wolf or the pack, and a gunner, who fired a 12-gauge shotgun out a door or side window. This procedure, done in late winter and early spring, could be dangerous to both wolves and fliers. Private bounty hunters obtained aerial shooting permits beginning in the late 1940s, and several died in accidents.⁴⁹ One pair experienced two accidents in a single day. As they chased a wolf over a hilltop, a ski struck the creature, disabling the landing gear. After repairing it in Fairbanks they returned to the North Slope and, while pursuing a wolf, crash-landed the plane. Uninjured but without food or sleeping bags, they snowshoed 60 miles to Chandler Lake.⁵⁰ The Predator Control Branch obtained its first aircraft in 1949 and lost at least one plane during a wolf control operation.⁵¹ While firing at a wolf on the North Slope, director Maurice Kelly shot the tip off a propeller. Pilot Bob Burkholder landed; they sawed off the opposite tip for balance and resumed the hunt.⁵²

TABLE 13.1. Furbearers Purposely and Accidentally Killed in Predator Control, 1951–1952

Source: Alaska Game Commission, 13th Annual Report to the Secretary of the Interior, July 1, 1951 to June 30, 1952 (Juneau, 1952), 15–17.

Note: Includes 223 wolves shot and 36 poisoned in Operation Umiat and one wolverine collected for the Cooperative Wildlife Unit.

Aerial wolf control reached its apex in a quasi-military event on the North Slope titled Operation Umiat. Pilots, wardens, traders, and military personnel in the Arctic had formed a consensus that a large population of wolves threatened to eradicate a shrinking caribou herd. Clarence Rhode explained that “my dream is to do enough wolf work in the Brooks to see if we can build that herd to the point where it will move back into the Yukon-Kuskokwim-Tanana areas where they [caribou] have been absent for so long.”⁵³ During several weeks beginning in March 1952 all seven Fish and Wildlife predator control agents in Alaska participated in Umiat, flying two Piper Super Cubs and a Piper J-5. Flying mainly out of the airfield at Umiat, the agents destroyed a total of 259 adult wolves and pups, keeping 102 for their skins or for research.⁵⁴ Agent Frank Glaser described the process:

In the ski-equipped planes we searched for wolves at an altitude of about 400 feet. When we found a wolf or a pack of wolves (generally from five to ten animals) we circled a mile or so away, dropped to within 40 or 50 feet of the ground, and flew directly toward them. The wolves usually ran straight away in single file. We’d fly on their left, and the gunner, using a shotgun loaded with buckshot, shot the wolves out the right side of the plane, often at ranges of 20 or 30 feet.

A few wolves learned to weave back and forth in defense, and some darted left under the plane out of the gunner’s sight. The operation nearly claimed the life of Glaser, who had killed a wolf on a mountain near the Killik River. Pilot Joe Miner landed the plane in a precarious spot, and Glaser got out to skin the wolf. The skis slipped and the plane took off before Glaser could get to his seat; Miner pulled him into the climbing aircraft.⁵⁵

In a sequel to Operation Umiat, private bounty hunters using caches of gasoline left by the military flew the area throughout the 1950s. They boosted the North Slope wolf toll to at least 1,500.⁵⁶ Considering that almost no research had been done on the Arctic caribou herds and plenty existed for consumption by Eskimos, some critics regarded Operation Umiat as a bureaucratic excess and an excuse for killing large numbers of wolves rather than an exercise of needed predator control.⁵⁷

Jay Hammond, who flew one of the planes at Umiat, summed up the Game Commission’s justification for wolf control:

To those of us who live in Alaska our game means food, money and recreation. Big business! Last year hunters, trappers and sport fishermen spent in the vicinity of $13,000,000 here in the Territory. This, by the way, is more than is derived from Alaska’s fabled mining industry. . . . In an effort to maintain adequate game herds in the face of a snowballing population, it is obviously necessary to reduce the numbers of animals killed by factors other than hunting. One of the few positive steps we can take toward this goal is to reduce the number of animals cut down by wolves. I wish there were enough game to go around for everyone—the wolf included. The big fat truth is, however, there isn’t!⁵⁸

A gunning team set a record of eighteen wolves in a single day in the Steese-Fortymile district in 1957.⁵⁹ In that same year the new Alaska Department of Fish and Game initiated a limited wolf control and research project as part of the Fish and Wildlife Service program. Near Wrangell and Ketchikan, agents set out poison stations to reduce predation of Sitka deer.⁶⁰

Between 1927 and 1958 the territory paid bounties on approximately 25,000 wolves and 20,000 coyotes at a cost of about $1.5 million (Table 13.2). Predator control officers added a minimum 2,000 wolves and 1,000 coyotes (Table 13.3).⁶¹ Although game officials believed wolves increased in most regions during the 1950s,⁶² the controls appeared to be drawing them down by the end of the decade. Efforts to reduce wolf populations gained force from recurring complaints of their killing reindeer and from their apparent slaughter of over 200 moose (about 75 percent of the local population) during a period of hard snow crust in the Koyukuk River Valley in the spring of 1957.⁶³ Officials claimed success in restoring herds of caribou to the point where hunting could resume. Control of the Nelchina wolves may have been overdone: a population of about 200 shrank to only a dozen by 1953, and by 1956 the caribou herd swelled to 36,000, nearly triple the normal size. In the spring of 1957 the Game Commission protected Nelchina wolves and coyotes and initiated a long-term predator-prey study.⁶⁴

TABLE 13.2. Alaska Bounty Expenditures, 1927–1958

Source: Donald E. McKnight, The History of Predator Control in Alaska (Juneau: Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game, February 1973), 4.

Table 13.3. Species Bountied and Taken in Predator Control Programs, 1927–1958

Sources: Donald E. McKnight, The History of Predator Control in Alaska (Juneau: Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game, February 1973), 2–5; Alaska Game Commission, Annual Report of the Executive Officer, 1927–1946; Alaska Game Commission, Report of Wolf and Coyote Bounty Payments, 1940, 12+; Annual Report of the Alaska Game Commission, July 1, 1956–June 30, 1957, 33; Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game, Annual Report for 1958, 95–103; Alaska Dept. of Fisheries, Annual Report for 1955, 100–101; 1956, 50–51; Willard A. Troyer and Richard J. Hensel, “The Brown Bear of Kodiak Island” (Typescript, Alaska Resources Library and Information Service, 1969), 193–196; Amos Berg, “Alaska’s Bald Eagles,” Alaska Fish and Game Trails (January-February 1971): 11.

Anecdotal reports from residents, guides, and agents, followed by brief surveys, identified bears as predators of moose on the Kenai Peninsula. Wolves had been exterminated there by 1915, and black bears had increased as a result of protection from 1935 to 1945. A more thorough study in 1949 produced stronger evidence that black bears frequently killed moose calves. Brown bears did also and sometimes took down adult moose. More than three decades later, a study in east-central Alaska showed that grizzly bears had killed more than three times as many moose calves as wolves had.⁶⁵ Only after statehood did bears receive general recognition as part of the picture of wild ungulate population dynamics.

The Predator Control Branch invested considerable energy in speeches to community groups and other public relations efforts.⁶⁶ In its final reports the branch proudly cited community backing for its predator control program, then employing 22 persons. It predicted, “Under statehood it is not anticipated that there will be any great change in the operations or organization of the Branch of Predator and Rodent Control.”⁶⁷ But ecologically oriented biologists in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, eager to assume jurisdiction over Alaskan wildlife, opposed most predator control as unwarranted interference in Nature’s balancing mechanisms. When they took over in 1960 the branch nearly expired. Its emphasis shifted to foxes and rats in the Aleutians, feral dogs in the towns, and a small-scale wolf control effort in the reindeer range of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.⁶⁸

PREDATION OF SALMON

As Alaska’s most economically valuable natural resource, salmon warranted conservation. But it would not be easy to control the behavior of fishermen aggressively seeking to maximize their catches. They blamed one another and wild creatures for salmon declines. Deputy U.S. commissioner of fisheries E. Lester Jones related the findings of his 1914 inspection trip:

Those engaged in the great fishing industry say the blame for the diminished number of salmon is due largely to natural enemies, which includes bears, wolves, eagles, gulls, terns, mergansers, hair seals, trout, and sculpins. These enemies undoubtedly destroy enormous numbers of salmon and their eggs. But this condition has gone on for years, and would continue without serious detriment to the supply if it were not for the added drain resulting from heavy fishing. . . . [M]an has as much to do with the waning supply of salmon now apparent in some sections. Of course, this great resource was made for man’s use, and . . . the fish are there to be taken, but properly and with discretion, so that the future supply will not be jeopardized.⁶⁹

Jones “saw hundreds and hundreds of humpbacks, silvers, and chums that had been thrown out of the water” by brown bears. Most lay untouched except for paw marks and missing cheeks, a part favored by the bears. Wolves, said Jones, “play a part similar to the bears in the destruction of salmon, but to a less extent.” He rated gulls and terns as the most destructive birds. He watched a huge flock of gulls pick the eyes out of humpbacks ascending a shallow stream. About 5,000 fish flopped helplessly when Jones flushed the gulls. He described eagles as a “contributing cause” of loss of salmon, and terns and mergansers as significant consumers of eggs and young fish. Hair seals destroyed salmon and fishing gear; and sculpins, Dolly Vardens, steelhead, and rainbow trout ate large numbers of eggs. Jones recommended removal of protection of gulls and bears and a bounty on wolves.⁷⁰

An array of fish, birds, and mammals consumed salmon eggs during the spawning runs or, later, ate the salmon fry. Lack of scientific evidence resulted in a hit-or-miss system of predator control. The Dolly Varden, a char found in the coastal salt and freshwaters of the Northwest, embarrassed territorial and federal officials alike. Under the assumption that it laid waste to young salmon and eggs, fisheries agents systematically trapped, killed, and discarded it. Federal hatcheries used it for fish food, and dams or racks prevented its ascension of spawning streams. Seines or gillnets captured it below the dams or in upstream lakes, and dynamite preceded release of fry in the lakes. Its numbers dropped off sharply in West Coast streams from Oregon to Alaska. Then fisheries biologist William Morton discovered that two species of Dolly Varden existed: one anadromous, or sea-run, and the other lake-dwelling. The sea-run char that had been targeted ate virtually no salmon or eggs; the lake dweller turned out to be the predator. A more mundane consideration ended the bounty, however. Payment called for turning in the tails, but checkers had difficulty identifying species. In one group of 500 examined, 355 proved to be salmon, 94 rainbow trout, and only 51 Dolly Vardens.⁷¹ Between 1931 and 1941 when it freed the Dolly Varden from bountied status, the territory paid out $96,344 in bounties.⁷²

Bears caught salmon as they ascended rivers and creeks to spawn. Inevitably, some commercial fishers perceived the bears as competition and cited them as a reason, or used them as an excuse, for salmon scarcity. A study done at Karluk Lake in the mid-1940s suggested that Kodiak brown bears took commercially significant numbers of sockeye salmon. Follow-up research over the next eight years convinced biologists that the brown bear did not pose a threat to fish supplies.⁷³

Sea lions, hair seals, and belukhas (white whales) also qualified as predators because they ate salmon, halibut, black cod, and herring. Sea lions ranked close to wolves in the negative reactions they inspired. Commercial fishers accused them of taking excessive amounts of salmon at sea, stripping fish off trolling and deep-sea lines, raiding traps or nets, and damaging gear. Salmon trap watchers kept guns onboard to shoot sea lions whenever possible. Captain Casper Hollingstad of Petersburg, longlining for halibut in 1946, filed a typical report: “Sea lions took lots of fish from us. Seemed like there was 2 or 3 around most of the time. We shot and killed one at close range. We could often feel them on the line, and one came up with a large halibut in his mouth. We lost a good many fish to them this trip but don’t know how many.” Sea lions reputedly learned to strip the lines underwater, swim out of shooting range, and eat the catch.⁷⁴

Interior Department researcher Ralph H. Imler and Alaska Game Commission agent Hosea Sarber carried out a 1945–1946 investigation of sea lion predation in response to the widespread complaints. They found that, while fishers exaggerated their losses, sea lions at times extracted 5 percent or more of halibut and sablefish catches. Of salmon trollers, “[V]ery few . . . lost more than six or eight salmon per year to sea lions.” Sea lions could be damaging around nets and traps, but elsewhere, stomach analyses showed only about 14 percent salmon and halibut by volume. Overall, the researchers judged, sea lions needed to be controlled where found in large numbers near important fisheries. Rifle fire could not effectively suppress them because of the time required and the difficulty of hitting them from moving boats. But “any rookery of 200 or more sea lions located in areas of extensive commercial fishing could be reduced to fifty percent . . . with a great saving of food fish, and without jeopardizing the sea lion population.”⁷⁵ Subsequent research found evidence of greater predation of halibut by sea lions—approximately $270,000 loss in the Gulf of Alaska in 1958. But stomach analyses again revealed no significant amount of commercial fish, and uncertainties remained.

Silver salmon damaged by harbor seals while in gillnet, Stikine River, 1946. By R.H. Imler. RG22 Box 71, National Archives at College Park. Nearly 2 percent of the gillnetted salmon examined by fisheries biologist Imler showed such wounds.

To combine predator control and commerce the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries arranged for a vessel to experimentally harvest sea lions from five rookeries between Kodiak Island and Unimak Pass in 1959. From the 616 sea lions killed, over 200 tons of meat went to mink farms.⁷⁶ But commercial use of sea lions did not prove economically viable, and the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act banned most sea lion killing.

Harbor seals closely rivaled sea lions as nuisances to commercial fisheries. They specialized in raiding the nets and eating or biting the salmon caught in them. Ralph Imler visited the two main problem sites, the Copper and Stikine rivers, in 1946. He estimated that about 2 percent of the spring red salmon run in the Copper, and a similar percentage of the fall silver salmon run at the Stikine, had been damaged by harbor seals. The annual monetary loss at the Copper tallied about $30,000. Rifle shooting to collect bounties effectively controlled harbor seals in the 1940s. In “pass shooting,” hunters waited onshore in the spring at a point where seals swam by to or from their feeding grounds. Commonly, men cruised along the shore in a powerboat until they came to a haulout site, pulled ashore, and shot as many seals as possible before they swam away. A few hunters approached the faces of glaciers where seals bore their pups on icebergs. Many seals could be shot but could easily sink or disappear in the moving ice. Men, two to a boat, also approached haulout sites at high speed and fired buckshot at mothers and pups.⁷⁷

Government seal hunter and harbor seals he killed, mid-1950s. Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 1957 Annual Report No. 9, Juneau, 1958, p. 52. The Territorial Department of Fisheries conducted a vigorous campaign to suppress seals under the assumption that they significantly predated salmon.

Bounty hunters and Alaska territorial fisheries employees systematically shot harbor seals in the 1950s. Beginning in 1951 the Department of Fisheries hired marksmen to shoot seals along the Stikine River. In one year a department hunter in Wrangell killed 998 before being stopped by a trigger finger infection contracted from a seal.⁷⁸

Near the Copper River, another major salmon gillnetting locale, the department used depth bombs at haulout sites. A description of this method appeared in the department’s report for 1951, the first year of its harbor seal control program:

The two skiffs were to run abreast at high speed in order to reach the rookery before the herd was able to disperse. As soon as the seal went into the water the dynamite charges, lit from a blow torch, were dropped overboard one after the other. The hunt would usually terminate one-half hour from the time of contact and the seals not killed migrated from the immediate area.

In the initial effort at Aukley Spit 50 seals were killed. Later in the day a small herd of 25 seals was located and killed at Edwards River. On October 18 another hunt was conducted at Aukley Spit and an additional 175 seal were killed. The most successful hunt was at the Big Softuk Bar where 250 seal were killed bringing the total estimated kill to 500.

Agents constructed bombs of 30 to 50 or more sticks of dynamite tied together. Canneries and fishing organizations, particularly the Cordova Seal Committee, donated a portion of the territory’s costs.⁷⁹ Between 1951 and 1958, agents dispatched an estimated 37,600 harbor seals and 90 sea lions in the Copper, Stikine, and Taku river sectors. Both shooting and bombing methods proved effective, noticeably reducing the damage to salmon caught in gillnets. Control measures had to be taken just before the fishing season and near the fisheries to work efficiently. Before the following season, seals moved in from elsewhere and replaced much of the lost population. In addition to those taken by agents, in the 31 years following 1927, a total of 358,023 hair seals of all species had been bountied at a cost of $1.175 million.⁸⁰ The organized seal control program ended in 1959,⁸¹ and bounties continued through 1967.

In the wake of complaints of salmon predation by belukhas, the territory initiated a research program in 1954 at Bristol Bay. During 1954–1956, agents killed 128 belukhas for study. They gave the bodies to Eskimos, who traditionally used them for food. Researchers concluded that the local concentration of 1,000–1,500 whales consumed 70,000–130,000 young red salmon each June and larger salmon later. Nevertheless, they calculated that the whales ate only 1.0 to 2.7 percent of the young salmon run, and “there would probably be no detectable increase in salmon entering the commercial catch or reaching the spawning grounds if predation by belukhas on adult fish were eliminated completely.” In the late 1950s experiments began on means of frightening away belukhas by playing killer whale recordings. Studies proceeded on salmon predation by belukhas, seals, sea lions, lake fish, gulls, and other birds.⁸² Researchers examined 20 more belukhas at the Kvichak River in 1958–1959 and a final 7 in 1965.⁸³

Seal faces collected for bounty, Chukchi Sea, May 1967. By Ken Ross. Over 40 years beginning in 1927, Alaska paid bounties on upwards of 1 million seals, partly as a welfare program.

FOX PREDATION OF SEABIRDS

Foxes, while not subject to bounties, presented problems for other wildlife and for sheep ranching. Fur traders put Arctic foxes (primarily the blue phase) and red foxes (the more valuable cross and silver phases) on islands from Attu to the British Columbia border. Prior to the commercial fur era, Arctic foxes existed only on the Commander and Pribilof islands and north of the Alaska Peninsula. Russians introduced them to Attu in 1750 and, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, throughout the Aleutians and eastward. Introductions occurred systematically by government order after 1819. Americans began stocking Arctic foxes about 1880, eventually placing them on islands all along the south and southeast coasts. Red foxes, native only as far west as the Fox Islands in the eastern Aleutians, were let go by Russians and Americans on islands in the Aleutians, the south, and the southeast. Between 1750 and 1920, fox farming efforts stocked a recorded 455 islands: 86 in the Aleutians, 63 on the south coast of the Alaska Peninsula, 51 in the Kodiak Island region, 73 in the Gulf of Alaska, and 182 in the Southeast.⁸⁴

The 1911 Fur Seal Treaty restricting the harvest of fur seals and sea otters stimulated the fox fur industry. Despite the Aleutians’ status as a wildlife refuge, entrepreneurs received licenses for fox farming on the islands. When the value of foxes rose in the 1920s, fox farms reached a pinnacle of 391. Top Arctic fox pelts sold for $460 and silver foxes for up to $2,800 in London. During the Depression the market crashed; the industry nearly expired in the mid-1930s. Island trapping essentially ceased in the late 1940s.⁸⁵

Wild birds, mostly seabird colonies, afforded a natural food supply for the free-running farm foxes. Natural balances soon deteriorated. Aleuts protested in 1812 the loss of seabirds whose skins they made into clothing; they turned to fish skins as a substitute. Russian navigator Vasilev, wintering at Atka in 1811–1812, mentioned that “the Aleuts complain that the foxes drive away the birds, which formerly were numerous and served as a source of feathers for clothing. Nowadays, to get birds they must travel to other islands.” Living in extreme poverty, the Aleuts had no footgear and few clothes. Foxes, said Vasilev, had been brought to Atka about twenty years previously and multiplied; a female could produce ten to twelve young annually.⁸⁶

Modern observers noted the work of red foxes placed on Big Koniuji Island in 1916: in less than three months a group of thirteen foxes killed about 100 horned puffins and 800 crested auklets. Foxes sharply reduced or eradicated surface-nesting birds except on inaccessible cliffs. Ground-burrowing species including tufted puffins, Cassin’s auklets, Leach’s and storm-petrels, ancient murrelets, and rhinoceros auklets virtually disappeared. Other species including rock and willow ptarmigan, common eiders, winter wrens, glaucous-winged gulls, and Aleutian terns steeply declined or vanished. Aleutian Canada geese, once widespread and found in the thousands on Agattu in 1910, survived only on three small islands. Later investigations showed that the loss of bird guano caused the vegetation of most of the Aleutian Islands to change from grasslands to tundra dominated by shrubs and forbs. Mammals introduced as fox food supplemented the effects of fox predation. Arctic ground squirrels, voles, lemmings, house mice, and deer mice ate eggs and young birds, as did Norway rats from supply ships. European rabbits, Arctic hares, and hoary marmots, in addition to the smaller rodents, sometimes overgrazed vegetation, creating erosion and damaging underground bird nests.⁸⁷ Feral cattle survived on seven islands where some had existed since the 1890s. They caused erosion, reduced protective vegetation needed for bird nesting, and trampled both surface and subsurface bird nests.⁸⁸

As the reservoirs of nesting birds evaporated and the fur market lapsed, many fox populations died out. Insufficient natural food and unfavorable climate worked against them in the Southeast. Various other phenomena may have caused fox disappearance: interbreeding; predation by brown bears, wolves, and otters; and natural disasters—a 90-foot tsunami cleared foxes off several small islands in 1946. Trappers using poison inadvertently exterminated foxes on Shuyak and Dark islands, but in 1970 cattlemen freed Arctic foxes on Sanak Island, whence they spread to nearby islands.

Blue fox at den next to seabirds it killed, Gareloi Island, Aleutians. By Victor B. Scheffer. RG22 WB Box 59, National Archives at College Park. Russian and American fur traders introduced foxes to hundreds of islands, endangering populations of breeding birds.

U.S. officials had first expressed concern for the fox impact on birds in 1930. The 1936–1938 Murie-Scheffer expedition reiterated the need for protection of seabird colonies.⁸⁹ Examining 1,800 fox scats from 22 islands, they found that birds, predominantly seabirds, accounted for 57.8 percent of the diet of blue foxes. The canines easily caught nesting birds and would also wait for the birds to dive near the shoreline and then jump in and seize them when they surfaced. On small islands and in the case of smaller nesting colonies, the foxes nearly eliminated the birds.⁹⁰

The new Fish and Wildlife Service, under the Department of the Interior, placed more emphasis on ecosystem restoration and land protection than it had under the Department of Agriculture. Aleuts protested a 1944 decision by the Interior Department to prohibit further placement of foxes on Carlyle Island, which had yielded $6,000 in furs in 1940.⁹¹ But fox farming and trapping lost their economic appeal in the 1940s.

Aleutian Islands refuge manager Robert Jones began a fox removal effort in 1949 on Amchitka Island. Fish and Wildlife agents broadcast poisoned bait over the island from a DC-3 aircraft, and no foxes (or feral dogs and cats left by the military) remained in 1960. The agency cleared Agattu between 1963 and 1969; beginning in 1986 it redid an unsuccessful 1963 attempt at Kiska. By 1992 the agency had freed 21 islands of foxes. It planned to complete 19 of the remaining 46 mostly Aleutian islands containing Arctic foxes.⁹²

Several difficulties accompanied the removal program. Rats, which thrived on several islands, appeared not to be affected by the control effort. They also preyed on bird eggs and young and may have eradicated song sparrows and winter wrens on Amchitka Island.⁹³ Removal of foxes increased rat populations. Both ravens and foxes disappeared on Amchitka.⁹⁴

A 1972 presidential order barred the use of poisons in predator control except by special permission for rehabilitation of endangered species. Agents employed this exception only for the Aleutian Canada goose, whose breeding populations they reestablished on Agattu, Alaid, and Nizki following fox removal. After 1986, regulations prohibited all poisoning, and the Fish and Wildlife Service had to rely primarily on trapping and shooting, methods effective only on small islands. Agents restored two islands by the introduction of sterilized red foxes, which killed off the Arctic foxes and then died out.⁹⁵ They removed feral cattle from three islands in 1985 but could find no effective method for getting rid of rodents.⁹⁶ Many fox removal efforts succeeded, but bird species nesting in burrows recovered very slowly. Surface-nesting birds tended to rebound dramatically.⁹⁷

OTHER EXOTICS IN THE ALEUTIANS

Fox introduction to Alaskan islands illustrated the economic orientation and ecological ignorance of the conservation era. It must have seemed logical that producing valuable crops on near-barren islands represented an improvement, a “conservation” achievement. And ideas for improvement ranged well beyond fox farming. In 1910 the Bureau of Fisheries sent biologist Walter L. Hahn to St. Paul Island to investigate prospects of introducing reindeer, sheep, poultry, muskrats, mink, river otters, crayfish, mussels, water lilies, and other potentially useful animals and plants. Hahn’s death by drowning brought the plan to an end.⁹⁸

A few years later scientists from the Bureau of Fisheries observed that swine, chickens, and cats had been brought to the Pribilofs. The cats had a negligible effect on the unwelcome community of house mice. Rats, however, had not gained a foothold. Attempts to establish muskrats and ground squirrels failed either in transit or after release. The scientists recommended against bringing in mink and river otters lest they eat the birds, or ptarmigans lest they be killed off by the native Arctic foxes.⁹⁹

Red foxes and predated lamb, Unalaska or Umnak Island, ca. 1958. By Lee Ellis. Alaska Game Commission, 20th Annual Report, July 1, 1958 Thru December 31, 1959. Foxes interfered with sheep raising in western Alaska and the Aleutians.

Subsequent importations to the Aleutians included more Arctic foxes until the 1930s, sheep (on Umnak and Unalaska), reindeer (on Atka, Umnak, and St. Paul), and caribou (on Adak). Foxes greatly reduced the native ptarmigans on Amchitka but less so on mountainous Adak. Blackflies found their way to Adak and eventually to Shemya and Amchitka, bearing the potential to harm birds through the blood parasites they carried. Placement of rainbow trout on Adak and Shemya and of Sitka spruces on several islands probably entailed fewer possibilities of ecosystem disruption.¹⁰⁰ Increased ecological awareness eventually phased out most exotic transplants by government agencies.

Securing permits from the Bureau of Land Management, sheep ranchers multiplied their flocks on Umnak and Unalaska islands from 1,300 to 6,000 in the late 1950s and planned for expansion to 20,000. They lobbied for fox control; the Game Commission initiated a program in 1957. Ranchers claimed the loss of 400 lambs prior to the 1958–1959 control efforts and very few afterward.¹⁰¹ The fox control program continued under federal jurisdiction after statehood.

PREDATION BY EAGLES

Unlike most other territorial predator control efforts, the eagle bounty sullied Alaska’s image in the States. An American national symbol, the bald eagle lived mostly along the coasts. It courted trouble by feeding on salmon and, allegedly, by stealing pups from fox farms. On Umnak and Unalaska islands, upon installing their sheep herds, ranchers demanded eagle control.¹⁰² Alaskans commonly believed eagles took significant numbers of game mammals as well. Governor Strong reported in 1915 that “the natural enemy of the mountain sheep is the eagle, very numerous on the Kenai Peninsula, which destroys the lambs.” In his 1918 report on game, Governor Thomas Riggs attributed the decrease of deer in the Southeast in part to “the greatly increasing depredation from wolves and eagles. The Territory provides a bounty of $15 on each wolf and 50 cents on each eagle. . . . It is my opinion that if the bounty on wolves were placed at $50 and on eagles at $5, in a very few seasons these menaces would be removed.” Riggs noted in 1920 that “from the upper Chitina come reports of a great many [mountain goat] kids having been killed by eagles, and one man reports having found the skulls of five kids in one aerie.” Riggs called attention to stateside conservationists who had proposed federal legislation to override the territorial eagle bounty. He rated the issue as one of three main points of territorial-federal dispute over game, next to restrictions on the sale of game and protection of grizzly bears. He warned that if the eagle protection law succeeded, “there will be a veritable crusade not only against eagles, but also against all laws of so-called conservation.” Riggs again called for higher bounties, to be paid by the federal government.¹⁰³

Some observers regarded the eagle bounty as less vital a measure. Bureau of Biological Survey representative Alfred Bailey noted in 1921 the comment of Fairbanks area warden Protzman that in the vicinity of the Wood, Johnson, and Tanana rivers “there are many eagles, bald eagles also, in the sheep hills, and it is stated that a pair of eagles will account for at least 50 lambs in a single year. . . . In my estimation, the eagle bounty should be fifteen dollars, the same as on wolves.” Less convinced of the eagle menace, Bailey thought the fox ranchers “have no evidence that these birds bother the foxes.” His recommendation to the bureau:

Remove the bounty on eagles, using such money as is in that fund for increasing the bounty on wolves. Hundreds of dollars have been paid out on eagles which have been living entirely on herring and dead fish. I believe, however, that it might be of advantage to have a zone system, allowing bounties for birds killed away from the sea coast, for such birds must necessarily live entirely on game birds and animals. The majority of these birds would undoubtedly prove to be the Golden.¹⁰⁴

T. Gilbert Pearson, president of the National Association of Audubon Societies, visited Alaska in the summer of 1927 to assess the evidence of predation by eagles. Traveling 2,000 miles in the interior, he saw about six pairs of golden and one pair of bald eagles. Twice he witnessed a golden eagle swoop toward a Dall sheep lamb accompanied by its mother. Officials at Mt. McKinley Park said they had no proof of significant sheep predation by eagles. In the Southeast where most bald eagles lived along the coast, Pearson watched them catch fish. He heard scattered claims of eagles taking young deer, furbearers from traps, or foxes from fox farms. Very few people had personally observed such events, however. A sheep ranch manager told Pearson he had seen eagles take dead lambs or wait for dying lambs but not carry off live ones. Pearson found a small number of people to be violently anti-eagle, an even smaller group defending the birds, and a large majority neutral, passively accepting the bounty, or uninterested. People variously attributed the motives behind the bounty to conservation of fish and wildlife, seeking votes of fox farmers, and diverting attention from the predations of commercial salmon fishers.¹⁰⁵

The bounty, raised to one dollar in 1923, markedly affected the eagle population. Former Alaska Game Commission executive director Ernest P. Walker noted in 1927 that “the Eagle bounty system has considerably reduced the eagles in southeastern Alaska in the ten years that it has been in effect, and to a lesser degree it has reduced Eagles along the southern coastline as far west as the Kadiak region.” Comparing his impressions in the pre-bounty period to conditions in 1936, ornithologist George Willett stated that “[t]he eagles had decreased to such an extent that the destruction by them must be very small. This was admitted by many Alaskans with whom I talked. . . . Unfortunately, the question has stopped being one of conservation and has become economic, in that many Indians and some whites . . . have come to consider the eagle bounty as part of their income.”¹⁰⁶

Alaska’s treatment of the eagle and the brown bear hatched a great measure of distrust among outsiders, who held the upper hand in deciding the fate of resources in Alaska. In a 1935 issue of American Rifleman, sport shooter Lucius Burch waxed eloquent over his Alaska experiences:

Eagle-shooting, of all the forms of rifle shooting, is a type of sport that is most attractive to the finished rifleman. . . . Unfortunately, there are few spots left where the eagle abounds in quantities sufficient to furnish consistent shooting. . . . [It is the] purest of all the rifle sports; a sport wherein the thorough shooter may have the fun of the game and incidentally pay his way as he goes.¹⁰⁷

Bald eagle shot for bounty, held by Jim Dolan, Valdez, ca. 1940. Core coll. 01-3891, Alaska State Library. Hunters killed more than 100,000 eagles, ostensibly to protect salmon stocks.

On his most successful day Burch gathered 31 pairs of eagle feet for one-dollar bounties. Frank Dufresne and other game officers, he said, assured him of the bounty’s validity “despite the howl of the sentimentalists back in the States.” In a lengthy discourse on the relative merits of rifles, bullets, scope sights, and other equipment, Burch decided that, in the case of his Winchester 54, “the killing properties are also excellent; in fact it is too good a killer, as eagles hit solidly are torn up to such an extent that they have a tendency to hang in the trees.” His 30-06, he said, “is too much gun for eagles. The great amount of shooting done each day is sure to cause flinching by all but the stoutest.” He added that “the eagle is at all times a large and tough customer . . . and he takes some killing.”¹⁰⁸

Reacting to the article, Aldo Leopold wrote president Karl Frederick of the National Rifle Association: “We gun enthusiasts are constantly complaining of restrictive legislation on firearms. Is it likely that the public is going to accord us any more respect and consideration than we earn by our actions and attitudes? . . . I would infinitely rather that [the author] shoot the vases off my mantlepiece than the eagles out of my Alaska.”¹⁰⁹

For years to come, Alaska retained its eagle bounty. A bounty hunter declared, “Alaskans have many definite reasons for their dislike of the great, soaring bald eagle of the craggy mountain fastnesses. They go in for the elimination of this destroyer in no uncertain terms.”¹¹⁰ Hunters climbed nest trees for chicks whose feet brought a dollar a pair.¹¹¹ Legislator and later governor William Egan won the nickname “Eagle Bill” for his sponsorship of a measure doubling the bounty on eagles.

Adolph Murie’s research exonerated the golden eagle, and separate studies by his brother Olaus and by warden Hosea Sarber determined that bald eagles nearly always fed on spawned-out salmon, not edible by humans. In 1940 a federal law banned molesting of eagles outside Alaska, which suspended its bounty in 1941, repealed the bounty in 1945, and reinstituted it and raised it to two dollars in 1949. An Alaska Game Commission regulation in 1952 permitted killing of eagles only when in the act of taking fish, wildlife, or domestic birds or mammals. The territorial legislature repealed the bounty after federal legislation outlawed the killing of Alaskan eagles in 1952. Over a period of 28 years between 1915 and 1952, Alaska had paid bounties for 129,273 (almost entirely bald) eagles.¹¹²

EVOLUTION OF PREDATOR POLICY

Predator control policy in pre-statehood Alaska evolved as did ecological awareness: slowly, but ultimately responsive to accumulating scientific information. Bureau of Biological Survey–Fish and Wildlife Service ties to agricultural interests supplemented pre-scientific attitudes in Alaska to perpetuate the suppression of wolves and other creatures. Similarly, Game Commission ties to hunters and trappers inclined it to kill wolves to ensure a game and fur supply. Few officials viewed predators as necessary elements of ecosystems. Field experiences of game agents tended to be anecdotal and often reflected settlers’ biases toward predators. Attitudes varied according to the species and its prey, the being the most resented. Some government officials and many settlers excepted the wolf from the generally held notion that species should not be exterminated; almost all thought it should at least be reduced numerically. The fight over wolves in McKinley Park turned the issue into a national debate in which the Park Service, enjoying widespread support, essentially held its ground in defining the wolf as a positive element. Studies by Adolph Murie, Lawrence J. Palmer, and Leopold and Darling constructed a base for a shift to an ecological view of the wolf, which informed policy in the early statehood period.

In the 1960s, attitudes changed toward most predator species. The wolf quickly gained a state and national constituency through popular literature and television nature shows. It became the centerpiece of Alaskan debates ending the bounty system by 1972. When the Alaska Department of Fish and Game renewed wolf control programs in the mid-1970s to raise moose and caribou numbers, it met intensifying opposition. But the need for more research, the persistence of Alaskans’ image of the wolf as predator competing for their meat supplies, and the dramatic rise of sympathetic and nonconsumptive uses of the wolf blocked any consensus on its environmental value for the remainder of the century. Protectors and prosecutors of the wolf engaged in ongoing conflict.

Coyotes, almost as frequently killed as wolves in control efforts, won minimal sympathy in Alaska. Perhaps, considering their recent arrival, people classified them as exotics as did Harry Liek. It would have been difficult to argue that they formed an ancient and integral part of natural balances in the North. Their reputation as a common nuisance in the States did not engender fears that they might be exterminated. And perhaps their smaller size and less noble bearing compared to the wolf gave them less potential to win the public’s admiration.

Bald eagles proved infinitely easier to rescue from predator status, in part as a consequence of their status as the national bird. Unlike the wolf they bore no significant legacy of threatening economic interests in the States. Studies by Olaus Murie and Hosea Sarber confirmed common-sense suspicions that eagles did not harm Alaska economically. Stateside opinion, expressed through citizen groups, precipitated a shift in national government policy. Essentially no agitation for eagle control endured in Alaska after 1952. While the eagle may not have been thought of as an element of a healthy ecosystem, opinion at least accepted the validity of its preservation as a species.

Sea lion and hair seal control elicited no noteworthy response from the stateside public. It continued in the form of seal bounties until the late 1960s. Federal and state research rationally assessed the belukha and exonerated it. The complexity and unfamiliarity of marine ecosystems acted as impediments to an ecological perspective on these mammals.

Foxes had no significant public following after the fur market declined in the 1930s. Eradication of introduced foxes denoted ecosystem sustainability: the restoration of seabird colonies on subarctic islands. Research as well as casual observation exposed the substantial damage done by foxes. Olaus Murie and other federal officials knew what needed to be done. Remoteness of the islands and the near-total absence of economic stakes permitted them to act without much interference, but not without mistakes. Yet difficulties of exterminating rodents, and modern restrictions on chemical use, deterred final victories for sustainability of the island ecosystems.

Predator control in Alaska represented a similar, belated version of earlier practices in the States. Numerous wild creatures inevitably threatened settlers’ economic interests. Large mammals such as wolves and bears elicited fears for personal safety, rarely warranted by the facts. Any challenge to the economic or personal well-being of American pioneers triggered a violently aggressive response. Whereas predators did not vote, politicians responded readily to the emotional demands of hunters, trappers, and settlers. Bounties proved popular regardless of whether they had any meaningful connection to predator-prey relationships. Advancing ecological science could not easily make headway against sentiments based on fear or economic advantage and among people who held little respect for science. Widespread understanding of predators relied on scientific proof but awaited social and economic changes in which the pioneer experience gave way to modern education and to a leisure-oriented society that valued nonconsumptive uses of wildlife.