Lobo: The Wolf that Changed America Natural World

Coming out West to hunt wolves was an impulse thing.

I never imagined it would change my life.

In the autumn of 1893,

a man called Ernest Thompson Seton came to New Mexico.

These were the dying days of the old Wild West,

and Seton's mission was to hunt down the last of the outlaws.

The outlaw wolves!

But what began as a two-week job turned into an epic duel.

A duel that would touch Seton's heart.

And one, which, in the end,

helped to change forever America's relationship with its wilderness.

And it was all because of one remarkable animal.

WOLF HOWLS

When I was a boy of ten, I was given this book,

Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton.

And it had a huge effect upon me.

Seton was a trapper naturalist

working on the prairies of North America,

and his first story is about Lobo, a wolf that he was hired to trap,

and it shows wolves to be brave,

fearless, touchingly loyal to one another.

I've never forgotten it.

The stage for the drama could hardly be wider, or more epic.

New Mexico, in the American southwest,

is a land where the rolling prairies meet the foothills of the Rockies.

By 1893, the year Seton came to hunt wolves,

this was a land being swept by profound change.

TRAIN WHISTLE HOOTS

The modern world was steaming in.

Settlers were arriving by the trainload.

What had recently been the land of the Apache and the buffalo

was now the land of opportunity.

Livestock were pouring in.

Ranching was big business.

But the old West hadn't completely disappeared.

Parts of northern New Mexico were still untamed.

In the remote Currumpaw Valley, wild wolves still roamed the canyons.

A vicious war was under way

to exterminate the last of these cattle killers.

COW MOOS

One of these wolves, however,

seemed to possess an almost supernatural ability to cheat death.

Hey!

GUNSHOT

GUNSHOT

Seton soon heard about this "super-wolf" from the cowboys.

He was known as "Lobo"...

..King of the Currumpaw.

Lobo and his band of outlaws

were blamed for killing hundreds of cattle,

and not surprisingly,

the cattle barons and their cowboys wanted him dead.

In many ways, Seton was the perfect assassin.

He'd hunted wolves for bounty money before

and written a manual for his fellow trappers on how to catch them.

WOLF SNARLS

He even claimed that one of his Scottish ancestors had wiped out

the last remaining wolves in the British Isles.

But behind the gun lay a more complex character.

Seton was a naturalist who'd grown up in the backwoods of Canada,

with a real love and fascination for nature.

He was also an artist,

trained in Paris and London,

whose favourite subjects were the wild animals of North America.

The story of the hunt for Lobo is the story of a divided man.

On the one hand, a romantic,

whose heart was with the wilderness and its wild creatures...

GEESE HONK

..and on the other, a hired hunter, who, like the cowboys,

saw wolves as somehow different from the other animals,

as wanton killers that had to be dealt with.

I am to get board and lodging, all expenses, and bounty monies,

in exchange for which I shall rid the cowboys of their demon wolf.

I think two weeks should be enough to catch the pest.

HOWLING

Little did Seton know

the remarkable wolf he was up against.

HOWLING

The wild and romantic story that follows

is based entirely on the journal that Seton kept at the time,

and the book he subsequently wrote.

It is, according to Seton, ALMOST completely true.

The animals, he later wrote,

were "real characters who lived the lives I have depicted".

And yet, Seton made such surprising, almost heroic claims

about Lobo and his pack

that we're bound to wonder how much of it we can really believe.

WOLF HOWLS

A dread of this Lobo has spread among the ranchmen,

and now the price set on his head is a thousand dollars,

a record bounty for a wolf.

He is my number one target.

Seton had come to New Mexico

equipped to wage a poison campaign,

a tried and tested method from his wolf-hunting days in Canada.

A piece of meat laced with a few drops of strychnine

makes a good wolf bait.

The poison causes violent spasms,

and the victim soon dies of asphyxiation.

But it's crucial that the bait is free from the taint of metal

or any trace of human scent,

or the wolf will get suspicious and avoid it.

It was late October. Seton set about laying his first baits.

Over the following days,

he made a series of wide circuits around the plains,

dropping a piece of poisoned meat every so often,

taking care not to touch them with his hands or to get off his horse.

Seton, the man who'd written the textbook on how to catch a wolf,

was confident that his expertly prepared baits

would soon bring him his thousand-dollar bounty.

Alongside his hunt for Lobo, Seton also pursued his love of nature,

taking every chance to learn more

about the wild inhabitants of the Currumpaw.

At first, this place seemed uninviting

compared to the lush prairies of Manitoba,

but the more I explore, the more I realise it's a paradise.

Every spiny bush is teeming with life,

and every day I make new friends and learn new facts.

I was amazed to see the prairie chickens still dancing in the fall.

PRAIRIE CHICKEN CHIRPS

Provided they're fat and fit,

they seem to like nothing better than a shimmy.

They share the plains with hundreds of prairie dogs,

and as far as I can see,

these little yap-rats never go more than a hundred yards from home.

Every burrow's a plunge-hole,

a sheer drop for rapid escape!

EAGLE CRIES

PRAIRIE DOGS CHIRP

Seton the naturalist

may have been cramming his notebooks with observations,

but his hunt for Lobo was about to suffer a humiliating setback.

November 3rd.

I set out in the afternoon to check my baits,

and soon picked up Lobo's tracks.

His monstrous paw print is unmistakable.

It measures over five inches from claw to heel,

which must put him at around 150 pounds.

Further ahead, I found that Lobo had come to one of my baits,

sniffed at it, and then picked it up.

I galloped on with eager eyes,

expecting to find him dead within a mile.

A second bait had been taken, and then a third.

But though I scanned the brush,

I saw nothing that looked like a dead wolf.

At the fourth bait, I discovered that Lobo hadn't really

taken my baits at all, but had merely carried them in his mouth.

Then, having piled the three baits on top of the fourth,

he'd scattered filth over them

to express his utter contempt for my devices.

Descriptions like this seem far-fetched.

Just how clever are wolves?

Could Lobo really have played a joke on Seton?

Since Seton's time,

we've learnt a lot more about wolf behaviour.

Today, Yellowstone National Park supports a thriving population

of wild wolves, which are closely monitored by scientists.

With over 20 years' experience of tracking and studying wolves,

Doug Smith is one of the world's leading experts,

and uniquely qualified to assess what Seton wrote.

Seton was imputing these powers of ridicule to the wolves

that really are beyond them.

Wolves really don't care about us.

But it's well known among wolf biologists

that when you trap and catch wolves a lot they get educated.

You teach them how to avoid you catching them.

The wolves that were left were getting educated

by the traps and the guns and the poison

that people were using to kill them.

What Seton encountered, in some ways,

was the best of the best.

WOLF GROWLS

Seton had come to New Mexico as a hired gun to do a dirty job,

expecting to stay for a couple of weeks.

But Lobo continued to elude him,

and as the weeks stretched into months,

the untamed beauty of the land began to cast its spell.

He was falling in love with the West.

He was also learning of the old days, when the wild game abounded,

and the wilderness was unspoiled.

I can usually reckon on seeing

a dozen or more pronghorn on the plains.

But everyone says that these bands are nothing compared with

the huge herds of days gone by.

This land is vast.

But beyond these horizons,

America is busy growing like an ugly, overfed brat,

too healthy to slow down, too young and ambitious to care about

what it destroys along the way.

In the Currumpaw, Seton had plenty of time

to think about America's dwindling wildlife.

Only a few years earlier, there had still been buffalo on the plains.

One of the cowboys saw a small herd

not far from here in '88, just five winters back.

These would have been the very last survivors in the entire Southwest.

For tens of thousands of years, wolves had survived

by hunting one of North America's most formidable prey species.

They'd pitted their wits against the sheer size and ferocity

of the buffalo.

This required teamwork.

It was little wonder that wolves had evolved

into such highly intelligent animals with intimate family bonds.

After the buffalo, a cow was a piece of cake.

The wolf problem clearly

is something that we have created.

First we annihilated the great herds of buffalo

that the wolves depended on for food,

then we filled the prairies with our defenceless cattle.

I am told that Lobo's band alone kills a cow every day.

COW MOOS PANICKEDLY

COWS MOO

Lobo's pack could slice through livestock

like a knife through butter.

Wolves probably could have killed as much livestock as Seton described.

The livestock was vulnerable and helpless.

We bred their natural defences out of them,

and wolves are intelligent and they had figured that out.

So wolves have a mentality, really, of, "kill everything you can".

Seton still had a job to do

and after the failure of his poisoned baits,

he now brought out a new weapon.

The double-spring, steel, wolf trap.

Perhaps a more muscular approach would defeat the wily Lobo.

Darien Brown lives today just a few miles north of the Currumpaw,

on a ranch where Seton is known to have stayed.

In fact, some of Seton's actual traps were left here

with Darien's grandfather, in this very barn.

Number 4½ wolf trap.

This is one of the actual traps that Seton used to try to catch Lobo.

These traps are designed to grab and hold their victims,

rather than kill them.

I'm gonna put some soft dirt in here

so the trap will set just right.

And all the time, keep in mind,

this is a real trap that'd catch me as well as any animal.

The wolf will actually put his foot on this.

It's what triggers it to go off.

Now, I want to keep an open area under...

..the trap pan so that when the animal steps on it,

it'll actually spring the trap.

If you had dirt underneath it,

it wouldn't go off, it'd just sit there.

Now, a real key element is to make this

about as natural with the ground around it as you can.

OK, nothing exposed.

Now we have the trap set,

and though it's over 100 years old, it still functions perfectly.

It's just designed to catch it.

They can still get blood circulation to their foot.

This is also hooked to a drag.

As it goes along the ground it'll get caught in a cactus or a tree

or anything along the way.

It slows them up enough, it leaves a mark on the ground

and then you can follow the animal.

December 13th.

This afternoon I went up the west canyon with rancher Bill Allen

and we put out a dozen traps along one of Lobo's trails,

always taking care to cover our scent and tracks.

Catching Lobo was becoming an obsession.

Seton simply didn't see wolves the way he saw other wild creatures.

Unlike wolves, which were killers,

animals like elk didn't threaten anyone's livelihood.

ELK CRIES

On the contrary, like the buffalo and the pronghorn,

elk were now themselves in decline,

the victims of over-hunting by man.

Seton's love affair with New Mexico was deepening by the day.

In fact, his concern for all of North America's wildlife

was very likely awakening.

But when it came to wolves, Seton was still thinking in the old way.

Throughout history, we have demonised wolves,

seen them as wanton, bloodthirsty killers,

almost the embodiment of evil.

WOLVES SNARL AND GROWL

Thursday, December 14th.

I rode out to check my traps and soon came upon Lobo's trail.

In the dust I could read the whole story

of his doings the previous night.

He'd run along through the scrub for a few hundred yards,

then turned towards my traps.

But upon reaching the first one, he'd scratched up stones and earth

till he'd sprung the trap and made it safe.

Continuing along the trail, Seton discovered that Lobo

had disarmed over a dozen of his traps in the same way.

How could he have seen through Seton's clever plan so easily?

Wolves are very, very observant of their environment.

They pay attention to a degree that people have a hard time fathoming.

They're just extremely attentive

to every little thing in their environment.

They knew Seton was after 'em,

and his other cowboys,

and so they became very attuned to his tricks.

And once they learn about traps, about steel,

they become hyper-observant.

That's all they're doin'.

The wily wolf had outwitted Seton once again.

It was going to be a long winter.

Week after week, I vary my methods and redouble my precautions,

yet there is only defeat after defeat.

The cowboys complain bitterly of their losses,

and each night Old Lobo mocks me with his triumphant howl.

LOBO HOWLS

December 24th. Went in the afternoon to trail wolves.

Saw only coyotes and jack rabbits...

Wolves have killed three cattle and a colt...

Christmas Day, 1893. Found many wolf tracks today but caught nothing...

January 5th. Bitterly cold. Baits untouched...

January 13th. Got nothing and saw nothing...

Today I have ridden without rest or stop between 35 and 40 miles...

WOLVES HOWL

I am facing total humiliation.

GEESE HONK

After months of failure, Seton must have been at his wits' end.

He hadn't even clapped eyes on Lobo.

What he desperately needed was a lucky break.

And eventually, that's exactly what he got.

I camped out above the creek,

close to where the snow geese and cranes are wintering.

They spend the nights huddled together in the marsh,

beyond the reach of the coyotes and the wolves.

GEESE HONK

It was the commotion of the geese

that led me to the clue I so badly needed.

I recognised Lobo's mark instantly...

..and then noticed a second set of tracks,

always, it seemed, running out in front.

Wherever these smaller tracks led,

Old Lobo was sure to follow, leaping and rolling in the mud.

Suddenly I realised what was going on.

The old marauder was in love.

WOLVES GROWL PLAYFULLY

Seton knew immediately that the she-wolf was his big chance.

A cynical new plan formed in his mind.

During the breeding season, which, apparently,

a lot of his story took place,

that male's tending that female extremely closely.

He rarely leaves her side during that time period.

I chase wolves with a helicopter. It doesn't hurt them, we have to do it.

But when we move in on 'em it's during the mating season

and you can always tell who's the breeding pair

because they will not separate.

And so they're moving around in their own little orbit of two,

and the rest of the pack breaks up and goes every which way.

That male wolf, the alpha male,

sticks right with that female.

I soon learnt more about Lobo's mate from the shepherds.

They call her Blanca because of her white coat

and they say she leads Lobo a merry dance.

This tallies with the tracks I saw at the creek,

and has suggested a way to catch her.

See if that's the right side...

That's good, that's good, right there...

Cunningly, Seton first placed traps rather obviously around a dead cow,

guessing that Lobo would stop and try to disarm them.

While he was thus diverted, Seton hoped that Lobo's mate, Blanca,

would run on to investigate the head of the cow,

which Seton had cut off and put to one side.

It could only be approached through a narrow passage between rocks,

and it was here that Seton planted several of his best traps,

properly deodorised, and concealed with the utmost care.

Wednesday January 24th.

This evening I am more excited,

and yet more anxious, than I have been in three long months.

Try as I might, I cannot get to sleep.

SHE-WOLF PANTS

SHE-WOLF SNIFFS

SHE-WOLF HOWLS

SHE-WOLF HOWLS IN PAIN

The following morning, Seton went up the canyon,

hoping that at last he had struck a blow against Lobo.

He was in luck. Blanca had walked right into his trap.

BLANCA HOWLS

According to Seton, Lobo remained close by,

reluctant to leave his mate.

BLANCA GROWLS

But it would have been suicide to stay and face the men's guns.

BLANCA GROWLS

Seton would later recoil from what he called

"the inevitable tragedy" that followed.

But the plain fact is, he was here to do a job.

He was here to kill wolves.

BLANCA GROWLS

SOFT, HAUNTING MUSIC PLAYS

Success at last.

Seton had claimed his first scalp.

And yet now, with Blanca dead, Lobo was about to touch Seton's heart,

and change forever the way he saw wolves.

The King of the Currumpaw had lost his mate.

DISTANT HOWLING

Tonight I heard Lobo up in the canyon,

and there was an unmistakable note of sorrow in his voice.

It was no longer the loud, defiant howl I had heard so often,

but a long, plaintive wail.

LOBO HOWLS

"Blanca! Blanca!", he seemed to call.

It was sadder than I could possibly have imagined.

I think there is an emotional attachment between wolves in a pack.

Certainly among a mated pair.

And the example I use is, here in Yellowstone a wolf died,

a female wolf, she was the alpha,

very similar to Blanca.

She was killed by another pack and the alpha male,

pardon my way of putting it, seemed to mourn.

He howled for two days after, more than anybody had seen him howl

and he wailed and he wailed and he wailed.

A little bit of what Seton described, in his story,

we've seen here in the wilds of Yellowstone.

Seton had brought Blanca's body back to his cabin,

but the last thing he expected

was for Lobo to throw caution to the wind and come looking for her.

CLATTERING

HE PANTS

GUNSHOT

Not once has he shown himself in all the months I've pursued him,

yet now he scorns his own safety to find his beloved Blanca.

HE SIGHS

We can only guess what doubts were creeping into Seton's mind.

But it was too late to stop now.

Seton had to strike fast, while Lobo's guard was down.

He gathered in all his traps, 130 in all,

and set them on every approach to his cabin.

Last of all, he used Blanca's scent as a lure to draw Lobo in.

Seton set out the next morning with confidence.

Every outlaw tale has its showdown

and for Seton and Lobo, the fateful day was January 31st 1894.

His plan had worked.

The first thing Seton did...

..was take a photograph.

It's an astonishing record that survives to this day.

Old Lobo, the King of the Currumpaw,

is clearly visible, caught in four traps, one on each leg.

That's what it had taken to stop this incredible wolf.

Seton had won.

After the long chase, he finally had Lobo at his mercy.

But face to face with his adversary,

Seton's resolve faltered.

Perhaps killing Lobo no longer felt like a victory, but a crime.

Perhaps, in his eyes,

Lobo was no longer vermin, but a creature with dignity,

courageous, loyal, and loving.

Until now, Seton had seen wolves simply as indiscriminate killers.

But they were obviously much more than that.

They were the very embodiment of America's vanishing wilderness.

It's as if the conflict within Seton

between the hunter and the naturalist was finally resolved.

He decided to take Lobo back alive.

Sadly, it was too late.

Lobo made no resistance to me.

He never once looked at me,

but acted as though he was alone on the plains.

His eyes were fixed on the far rolling mesas,

his passing kingdom, where his famous band was now scattered.

When the sun went down, he was still gazing out across the prairie,

but within a few hours the old king-wolf was dead.

We know that an eagle robbed of his freedom,

a lion shorn of his strength, a dove bereft of his mate, all die,

it is said, of a broken heart.

And so it was with Old Lobo, the King of the Currumpaw.

It was Lobo's loyalty to Blanca that had been his downfall,

and now Seton took Lobo to be with her again.

Seton profoundly regretted what he had done.

He never killed another wolf.

When I read Seton's story, to a certain degree I filtered through

a lot of his flowery language.

I looked at it through a biological lens.

Is what these wolves were doing, given the context of the time,

which was no to little natural prey, a laser focus on killing livestock,

an incredible ability to avoid traps and guns and poisons,

is all that possible? Absolutely.

Do wolves have an incredibly strong attachment

between a mated pair?

Absolutely.

Lobo, the last outlaw wolf of New Mexico, was dead.

The Currumpaw Valley had been silenced.

It was "job done".

By 1894, it seemed that virtually all of America's wilderness

was destined to be cleaned up, civilised, and made safe.

Seton had come here in the twilight years of the Wild West,

just as the sun was setting on a magnificent, untamed world.

And he had played his part in its destruction.

If we're inclined to judge Seton harshly, we should remember that

in the 1890s, wolves were cattle killers

and could ruin the livelihood of the pioneer ranchers and the cowboys.

But that was not the end of Lobo's impact on the world of men.

In fact, it was just the beginning.

What happened next, to Seton and the story he wrote about Lobo,

would have a profound effect

on the relationship between Americans and their wilderness.

TRAIN WHISTLE HOOTS

Seton returned east, deeply affected by

his Western adventure,

and determined to record what had happened.

In the story he wrote, he boldly cast himself as the villain

and the wolf as the hero.

WOLF HOWLS

His book, Wild Animals I Have Known, was an immediate worldwide hit.

Virtually overnight, it propelled Seton from a little-known naturalist

into a major celebrity.

But what really mattered to Seton now

was saving America's wilderness, before it was too late.

Historian David Witt thinks the turning point can be traced back

to a single word in Seton's journal.

He has this last word in the entry, "Why?"

And it's a very big "why". It was even written in large letters.

I thought maybe he was putting down that "why", asking,

"Why did the animal die?"

because he follows up with a couple of notes

about the physical condition of the animal.

But I think that the "why" was much bigger than that.

It really was a "why" asking, "Why are we doing this?

"What is our relationship to nature?

"Why are we destroying it like this?"

At a time when few people questioned the destruction of nature,

Seton spoke up for the wilderness.

His views about the value of the wild

found favour with politicians like Teddy Roosevelt

and helped to turn the tide of public opinion.

Seton used his influence to push for the creation of more national parks.

Thousands of ordinary Americans

became aware of their spectacular natural heritage.

So Seton took a leading role

in what became the conservation movement,

and eventually the environmental movement.

He was talking about our relationship, not only to animals,

but to all of nature.

He was doing it in a very ecological way.

He was certainly one of the first ecologists.

Seton also lobbied for hunting restrictions

and anti-poaching measures,

and was instrumental in pushing through radical new laws

to protect migrating birds.

He did lobby for environmental legislation, including the first

wildlife legislation that protected migratory animals.

And because of Seton, they lobbied Congress and expanded

federal government authority to the interstate control of wildlife.

It was a major increase in federal government authority, and it laid

the groundwork for every single piece of environmental legislation

that has come after that time.

And it wasn't just a question of SAVING the wilderness.

Seton felt that people had to experience it

in order to care about it,

that it should be a part of everyone's upbringing.

Inspired by the values of Native American culture,

he founded the Woodcraft Indians,

an organisation that taught children many of the skills

needed for outdoor life, along with a respect for nature.

Many of these ideas were later adopted

as the basis for the Boy Scouts in England, and Seton himself

was a founding father of the Boy Scouts of America.

By the early years of the 20th century,

the United States led the world in the conservation of nature

and tens of thousands of children

were heading off to camp in the woods and the mountains.

Seton had been a prime mover in all of this

and it had all started back in the Currumpaw, in the autumn of 1893,

when he'd set out to kill an outlaw wolf called Lobo.

But what about wolves?

Was the new, nature-loving America ready to embrace its old enemy?

For decades, Seton was virtually alone

in his desire to protect wolves alongside the other wild animals.

It's taken a long time for the rest of America to catch up.

As head of the wolf reintroduction program in Yellowstone,

Doug Smith sees his job as trying to complete what Seton began.

The change of heart to wolves

has only been going for about 30 or 40 years.

I mean, literally, in the United States in the 1960s,

most people still thought wolves were bad

and I think what we had

is an awakening to a new environmental movement,

and that killing all these predators,

wolves and other carnivores,

without question for so long...

I think the light bulb went on in people's heads as..."Why?"

But I need to be very clear.

There is still a large group of people

who retain the old view of wolves.

I know people who have come up to me and said,

"My grandfather killed off this animal to make life here easier,

"and you're bringing it back."

So attitudes have changed, but the old attitudes still exist

and so now we're at this very polarised bashing of heads

about how to...live in this world

because some people feel predators like wolves have no place, still,

as many people felt in Seton's time.

But others are saying,

"Hey, we made a mistake, and we need to bring wolves back."

Seton has had a tremendous impact on where we are today,

in terms of respecting nature.

And I think enough people, at least in North America,

Canadians and Americans,

recognise that we have maybe overstretched our reach,

in terms of what we've taken.

Like many a good tale from the Wild West,

Lobo's story is a mixture of myth and truth.

On the one hand, we know that Seton could exaggerate.

The reward on Lobo's head was NOT a thousand dollars,

but a mere 12,

and we know from Seton's diary that Lobo was not a monster

of 150 pounds, but an averaged-sized wolf.

On the other hand, there's a lot of truth in the story.

Many of the traps that Seton used are still there, in New Mexico.

There's Seton's photograph of Lobo in one of those traps.

And we have this.

It's the skull of one of the wolves

that Seton killed,

with Seton's own label still attached.

And the museum that owns it

thinks it may well be

the skull of Blanca.

Whatever the truth,

the important thing about this story is that it depicted wolves

in a more realistic and more sympathetic way

than anything that had been written before.

The duel between Seton and Lobo

may have ended in sad deaths,

but it also breathed new life

into the Americans' appreciation of the wilderness.

WOLF HOWLS

In later life, Seton returned to live in his beloved New Mexico.

I have been much criticised,

firstly for killing Blanca and Lobo

but chiefly for telling of it, to the distress of many tender hearts.

To this I reply,

in what frame of mind are my readers left with regard to the wolf?

Are their sympathies quickened toward the man who killed him

or toward the noble creature who died as he lived,

dignified, fearless, and steadfast?

Right up to his death in 1946,

Seton continued to reflect on the wolf that changed his life.

Ever since Lobo, my sincerest wish has been to impress upon people

that each of our native wild creatures

is in itself a precious heritage that we have no right to destroy

or put beyond the reach of our children.