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Aldo Leopold might have been speaking directly to Montanans when he reflected on man's relationship with the wolf. For this issue has remained hotly partisan and intensely volatile-beginning with the earliest confrontation between Montana stockmen and the wolf in the 1880's. Finally, during the Great Depression, a ranchers' decade-long campaign eliminated the wolf from the Montana landscape. Now, however, with the return of wolves to several areas of the state, the story of the wolf in Montana deserves a measured telling.

Before the European settlement of North America, commencing in earnest in the seventeenth century, the gray wolf (Canis lupus) inhabited lands from coast to coast and from northern Canada to central Mexico. In fact, this wolf enjoyed the widest distribution of any land mammal, a testament to his ability to adapt to diverse environments. One subspecies proved most prevalent across Montana: Canis lupus nubilus. Estimates of wolf population in Montana in 1800 run as high as 200,000 animals. Biologists currently figure the number at fewer than 100.

The adult Montana wolf stands 30 to 38 inches high, weighs between 80 and 125 pounds, and stretches from 5 to 6 feet long, including the tail. He can live more than thirteen years, although most do not reach five years of age. At a full run, a wolf can hit 40 miles per hour, but he maintains a more normal, slow trot of 5 miles per hour in open country for hours on end. As a result, a wolf can cover as much as 100 miles per day-though a more normal day course, in search of food, covers 20 miles. A wolf's regular hunting foray often comprises a 60-mile circle.

A wolf is a carnivore, which kills to eat, so the availability of food dictates his hunting region. He accepts a lifetime mate, but if that companion dies, he will breed with another. Together the pair raises a series of litters, each of which can number six or eight pups or more.

The tendency of wolves to form a pack results from both the family's social organization and the size of its prey. For example, a pack of twenty wolves may form to stalk a bison or a moose, but that number is excessive when hunting rabbits. In hunting wild game, the wolf most often selects young, aged, or weak victims, because the kill is easier.

When the Lewis and Clark expedition crossed Montana in 1805 and 1806, its members encountered numerous wolves. They found them particularly on the plains, feeding on bison, but also in the wooded mountains. Hard on the heels of the Lewis and Clark expedition arrived the fur trapper, descending from the north and ascending the Missouri River from the Southeast. Until 1840, however, the fur industry relied on the beaver trade.

About 1859, however, the fur trade shifted its emphasis from beaver to buffalo hides, wolf pelts, and deerskins. As long as the bison herds lasted (into the 1880s), the buffalo hide dominated this skin trade. Nevertheless steamboats consistently freighted wolf pelts down the Missouri River to St. Louis. The American Fur Company shipped only twenty wolf pelts from Ft. Benton in 1850, but by 1853 that number had risen to more than three thousand. During the mid-1860s, wolf pelts annually ran between five and ten thousand, collected from Company posts along the Missouri.

The abundance of wolves in Montana between 1860 and 1885 spawned an occupation peculiar to the Great Plains: the "wolfer." As long as a market remained for wolf pelts, men who worked seasonally on the steamboats, or in freighting or mining, resorted to "wolfing" during the winter, when the wolf pelt became prime.

By the early 1880s, several outside forces changed the role played by the wolf on the Montana plains. First, wolfers had killed so many animals that wolfing became only marginally profitable, and many men abandoned the trade. Second, buffalo hunters rapidly were depleting the large bison herds on the plains. The last productive bison-hunting season in the Yellowstone Valley was 1881-1882; by 1884 only small groups of bison could be found scattered on the Montana prairies. As a result, the two parties most dependent on the bison-Native Americans and wolves-needed to adapt quickly to alternate food sources.

The third factor altering the wolf's role involved stockmen who, beginning in the 1870s, pushed small herds of domestic cattle from sheltered river valleys out onto public-domain prairies. These cattlemen had learned that range cattle could survive Montana winters by grazing on the nutritious native grasses. By the early 1880s, hundreds of cattle outfits were running massive herds on the plains that once had fed the bison.

The wolf long has preyed on domesticated cattle. The pattern developed in Europe even before it began in North America-wherever settlers brought cattle into the wolf's traditional habitat. Plymouth Colony placed the first American bounty on the wolf in 1630.

However, the open-range cattleman of the 1880s, using Montana's free grasses, faced an even greater threat from the wolf. For this stockman was not protecting a few milk cows around his log cabin, he was casting thousands of head across an unfenced landscape. He infrequently saw his cattle, and he held little control over their daily safety. This cattleman could sustain a substantial loss as a result of weather, theft, and predators. Yet, economically, he could not permit the large numbers of wolves roaming the Montana prairies to feast uncontested on his herds.

The open-range cattleman, working in a highly speculative industry, found in the wolf a convenient scapegoat for several of his problems. In addition, the stockman cultivated a real hatred for the wolf; based on actions he believed demonstrated the animal's cowardice.

The "wolf problem"-as popularly known on the Montana plains in the early 1880-proved one of several factors that convinced ranchers that livestock associations had become necessary to benefit the industry. Local stock groups and the Montana Stock Growers Association lobbied the territorial legislature to create a bounty on range predators-the bear, the mountain lion, the coyote, and especially the wolf.

Passed by the 1883 assembly, the first Montana bounty law provided that the territorial government would pay $1 for each wolf hide presented to the probate judge or justice of the peace. The bounty hunter could sell the skin privately, which usually brought another $1 to $2.50, depending on its condition. The stockmen believed that, at about $3 per wolf, it would become profitable for hunters to return to the occupation of wolfing. Their belief proved correct

The Montana bounty law changed through the decades, revised as stockmen's pressure on the legislature waxed and waned. Following the "Hard Winter of 1886-1887," surviving Montana cowmen renewed their campaign to rid their range (now rapidly being fenced) of the wolf. The bounty provided $2 per pelt (1891), and the amount rose until it peaked at $15 (1911). In addition to the state bounty, some counties, cattlemen's associations, and sheep ranchers' groups provided high supplemental bounties. And hunters could still sell the pelt on the open market.

After the turn of the century, the number of wolves presented annually for the bounty declined. The legislature finally repealed the general bounty law in 1933. Nevertheless, the bounty system performed effectively for the stockmen. It provided a real incentive for wolf hunters to reduce the predator's numbers. More important, it functioned as a visible weapon in the stockmen's public-relations campaign against the wolf. Raisers of horses, cattle, and sheep admittedly exaggerated their predator losses to argue for higher bounties. They then flooded newspapers with anti-wolf publicity, and that publicity in turn only intensified the stockmen's hatred of the wolf

By the 1920s, the vast majority of Montana wolves had been eliminated. As a result, two interesting sociocultural phenomena evolved. The first involved documenting the killing of the "last wolf" in an area. The second entailed identifying specific "renegade" wolves, to which stockmen attached names like "Snowdrift" and "the White Wolf of Judith." In the case of the "last wolf" phenomenon, the Montana media showed little remorse in reporting the killing. Decades of anti-wolf publicity, emanating from the livestock industry, could not be denied.

For all practical purposes, no "wolf problem" existed in the state after the early 1930s. A population of hundreds of thousands of wolves in 1880 had been eliminated within fifty years. In 1933, the Montana legislature abolished its general bounty on the wolf-although such a bounty remained a county option. Lawmakers agreed that this predator no longer posed a statewide threat to the determined, politically powerful stock growers. Between 1883 and 1918, state officials had paid $342,764 in bounties for 80,730 wolves.

After 1930, wolves surfaced in the state only occasionally. Authorities included the Montana wolf on the federal list of endangered species in 1973, and on the complementary state list in 1975. Thus the wolf has been afforded complete legal protection from hunters, trappers, and ranchers.

In 1980 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service developed the Northern Rocky Mountains Gray Wolf Recovery Plan-and revised this management policy in 1987. The plan encouraged the recovery of wolves in the Glacier National Park area, in the central Idaho wilderness, and in Yellowstone National Park. This recovery would rely on natural migration in Glacier and Idaho, and upon artificial reintroduction in Yellowstone. Despite livestock-loss compensation programs, such as that instituted by the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife, open hostility to the wolf remains.

A wolf's return to their Rocky Mountain habitat, their human proponents face strong, rancorous opposition from Montana's livestock industry. For a full century, the state's ranchers have hated, fought, and killed the wolf. Any attempts to return this animal to Montana must face this angry, determined, well-organized force of Montana stockmen. Hating the wolf is ingrained. It's highly emotional. It's the Montana rancher's heritage. One need not look hard for the answer to the question, "Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf?" He needs only to look at the historical record.