Ep. 14: Wolf West | The American West

As a native family of American animals, for more than five million years wolves of various kinds have been keystone predators of western ecologies. Before humans arrived they shaped the West more than any other mammal species. Numerous, nearly tame, and admired by Native people, wolves continued this role until the arrival of people from the Old World initiated a continent-wide war against wolves. While wolf pelts became a target of the western market hunt, into the early 20th century most wolves were destroyed by bounty hunters and “wolfers,” who trapped and poisoned hundreds of thousands of wolves at the behest of livestock associations and state governments. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  I got in my hand here, it was just clipped to my pocket, but it's in my hand right now, the Montana. It's MKC, Montana Knife Company's first folding knife. Designed, tested, built by actual hunters. The Montana is the first folder Josh Smith has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. These things are great. You are gonna love this folding knife.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  As native animals, wolves shaped American ecologies for millions of years and impressed early travelers with their numbers and tameness. But were rapidly destroyed in the West when old world stock raising replaced an Indian managed world. I'm Dan Flores and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Wolf West.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  At the midpoint of the 19th century, when Americans were regularly traveling through the West, but except for spotty locales in the southwest and on the west coast, had yet to settle it, aspects of the ancient Indian-managed continent were still in place across much of the western country. Judging by the accounts of those who witnessed this period, the Catlins, Bodmers, Audubans, this native West would have been something to see, one of the spectacles of the world. No element of this surviving version of western America amazed travelers as much as the staggering abundance of wild animals. And for people used to the civilized conditions of the East or Europe, no western animal imparted

• 2:46Speaker 02

  as much shock and awe as wolves. Michael Steck, a physician traveling the Santa Fe Trail in the early 1850s, was one of many who offers us a glimpse of what life in a fully-wolfed West was like. Steck and his party found that anytime they got among bison herds, wolves became so astonishingly numerous that, as he wrote, "We see immense numbers of them. A common thing is to see fifty at a sight. In the daytime, we are never out of sight of them, see hundreds in a day." That comported with wildlife painter John James Audubon's comment on the Upper Missouri River that "if ever there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's the

• 3:31Speaker 02

  one we are now in." But here's the thing, today, you could drive repeatedly across the country where Steck wrote of seeing hundreds of wolves a day, or along the Missouri where Audubon reported the most abundant wolf population he had ever encountered and never see a single wolf, not one. Our erasure of them in the years from 1850 to 1925 was that thorough.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Until about 1925, though, the American West was, and for five million years had been, wolf country. Consider that for a moment, and understand what an anomaly the past almost wolf-free hundred years has been to a story like that. The West wolves were from a family of animals, the Canidae, that evolved in North America. And although some of them migrated elsewhere and took on their present forms in Asia and Europe before they returned to America, until the 1920s, there was never a time when wolves were not America's keystone predators.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Before humans first got here 22,000 or so years ago, wolves probably shaped life in America more profoundly than any other mammal. Wolves, in other words, played a crucial role in Western nature for millions of years before we ever set foot on the continent. Long before we Old Worlders arrived with our peculiar hatred of predators, virtually every ecology in the West was shaped from the top down by the presence of wolves. The Canidae family first appears in the fossil record of the American Southwest about five and a half million years ago.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Like American evolved wild horses, our early wild Canids became geographically cosmopolitan by crossing the land bridges connecting America to Eurasia. At the same time, there were other wolves that stayed home, giving rise to animals that became Eastern wolves, and spawning the intriguing Red Wolf of the South, as well as coyotes. As we all know now, from this year's The Extinction Announcement from Colossal Bioengineering, and full disclosure, I'm a member of Colossal's Conservation Advisory Board, the super-sized American Direwolf was also part of the Canid mix in ancient America. There's still unresolved science about Direwolves.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  A 2021 article in Nature arguing that Direwolves may be different enough from other American wolves to belong in a genus other than Canis, one called Anocion.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Before about 25,000 years ago, when gray wolves began loping home to America from Eurasia, very large and very white dire wolves dominated the wolf story in America. At Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in California, more than 4,000 of these burly 150-pound wolves died in the asphalt seeps. Their remains there outnumber those of gray wolves by 100 to 1. Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin notwithstanding, dire wolves were not fated to survive the extinction crash that ended the American Pleistocene 10,000 years ago. During that great extinction pulse, smaller gray wolves somehow outcompeted dire wolves.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  But dire wolf extinction still left America with a soup of several wolf types, including coyotes. There were no survivors of the dire wolf genus Anosion, though, until colossal scientists edited into a gray wolf genome 20 specific genes of dire wolf DNA from remains that were 72,000 and 13,000 years old. Then through a surrogate mother, scientists birthed Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi in late 2024 and early 2025. As for gray wolves, once they joined the other American canids in the late Pleistocene, they decidedly made their presence felt.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Big, 5- to 6-foot-long pack hunters weighing 80 to 120 pounds, gray wolves outmatched their long-lost relations, eastern and red wolves and coyotes, in both size and pack instincts. Once dire wolves disappeared from the continent, gray wolves were left as the swaggering big dogs everywhere, including the West. Gray wolves seem to have migrated home to America in distinctive waves. Half a century ago, biological taxonomy designated a whopping 23 species of Canis lupus. In 2011, though, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to come to terms with modern genetic research on wolves

• 8:29Speaker 02

  and concluded that North America's wolves sprang from two origins. Eastern wolves, red wolves, and coyotes all represented American wolf evolution, animals that never left the continent. Gray wolves, on the other hand, constituted animals that had started here, spent some millions of years in Eurasia, then returned in several separate distinct waves of animals during the Pleistocene. This taxonomic rethink has shrunk the number of gray wolf subspecies from the 23 of the 1940s down to only four. Arctic white wolves, Canis lupus arctos, found in the extreme north of the continent, were probably the last to come home to America.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  The rocky mountain wolf, Canis lupus occidentalis, found from the Montana Rockies northward to Alaska, was likely another late arrival from Asia. The small gray wolves of Mexico and the American Southwest, Canis lupus baleii, the Mexican wolf, may have led the migrations home. But the wolf that occupied more of America than any other, extending from the Pacific across the Great Plains on to the Western Great Lakes and northward through much of the eastern half of Canada, was Canis lupus nubilis. This was the famed buffalo wolf, the lobo, loafer, or white wolf of the plains of so much Western history.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  All these gray wolves arrived in time for one of the grandest predator barbecues in world history. Before the Pleistocene ended, gray wolves joined short-faced bears, saber-toothed and scimitar cats, false cheetahs, step lions, and running hyenas to chase and pull down camels, sloths, horses, long-horned bison, and perhaps mammoth calves in an Afrika-like world that almost seems like science fiction to us now. After the Pleistocene extinctions took out all the giants, a reconstituted Western bestiary bequeathed to Western gray wolves their classic place in American ecology. With buffalo, the only Western grazer still standing after the extinctions, bison numbers

• 10:39Speaker 02

  skyrocketed to between 20 to 30 million animals. Some 1.5 to 2 million buffalo wolves served as their primary predators in this new order. As famed Western trader and author Josiah Gregg put it in the 1840s, although the buffalo is the largest, he has by no means the control among the prairie animals. The scepter of authority has been lodged with the large gray wolf.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  As keystone predators, wolves apparently influenced continental ecology in ways that ripple through nature, affecting not just populations of prey species, but also other predators and scavengers, even down to the kind of vegetation like aspens or cottonwoods found on a landscape. With gray wolves present, coyote populations went down and fox numbers went up in a kind of bigger dog beats up littler dog equation. Wolf predation exerts strong evolutionary pressures on the behaviors and even habitat selections of wolf prey species. Such was the scepter of authority the gray wolf wielded on western landscapes a century

• 11:51Speaker 02

  ago and for multiple millions of years before that. Wild America was a world in good part created by wolves. In a North America inhabited by native people who never domesticated or herded wild ungulates, and who thought of all wolves as kin, teachers, and totem animals, wolves were free to play their top of the pyramid roles as keystone predators, shaping ecologies down to the birds that sang and the plants that grew. But 400 years ago, the arrival of old-worlders at once challenged that ancient algorithm. From the Old World's foothold in Massachusetts, Bostonian William Wood wrote of the wolf

• 12:36Speaker 02

  "from the very beginning as a special and confusing problem for colonizers." The confusion came from America's wolves not acting the way Europeans had been told wolves should act. "In America," Wood wrote, "it was never known yet that a wolf ever set upon a man or a woman." That seemed impossible, given the folk traditions about wolves in the Old World. All those folktales and biblical passages about ravening wolves left colonists disoriented when America's wolves showed no aggression towards people. But wolves in the numbers America held were still unexpected, and that led to a certain

• 13:21Speaker 02

  despair in 1630's New England, since, as Wood put it, "there's little hope of their utter destruction."

• 13:30Speaker 02

  So from the start, the wolf was an animal of special concern for Europeans. But why? Partly, there was their lack of familiarity with the real thing. England's own wolves hadn't lasted beyond the 1400s. Virginians and New Englanders were living among wolves for the first time in their lives, and as Wood implied, they didn't like it in the least. Then there were their imported cultural traditions. When you had herded domesticated animals for 8,000 years, as these old-worlders had, and religion was your way of understanding how the world worked, there was a natural tendency to see wolves as a supernatural malediction.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  For Christians, atoms fall from the Garden of Eden into an earth compromised by evil struck them as the self-evident origin of wolves. After all, didn't wolves share the yellow eyes medieval illustration gave to Satan? Some of America's wolves were even black, a coloring that to Europeans was suspicious. In the 1620s, the actual explanation for black wolves lay in scientific work four centuries in the future. A genomic study from our time indicates that black coats in America's wolves sprang from a hybridization event between wolves and domestic dogs in the northwest of the

• 14:53Speaker 02

  continent approximately 13,000 years back, during Clovis times. The mutation conferred a fitness advantage, perhaps in disease resistance, that other wolves sensed. So the visual clue of blackness affected mating choice, allowing at least some black wolves to greet Europeans thousands of years later. Native people admired wolves, whatever their color, for their bravery, hunting skills, and devotion to mates in packs. Europeans saw those same animals as bloodthirsty monsters, evil actors in a fallen world. Folk stories of werewolves, dim memories of part-human, part-animal fantasies from the

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Paleolithic still circulated in colonial times and fed a suspicion that wolves might be avatars of a residual animality in humans. So the unsuspecting animals were soon to enjoy the full colonial experience of a wolf war.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  The reality was that wolf social lives and ecological roles were so similar to our own that it was no accident that tamed wolves had become our first domesticated animals 25,000 years before. Wolf societies were much like human hunter-gatherer bands. In both, the leadership was usually matriarchal. The alpha female wolf directs a pack's movements, while the larger males, especially those between about 2 and 5 years old, are the primary hunters. As highly social creatures, wolves are members of family packs led by high-status breeders

• 16:37Speaker 02

  who avoid breeding with close kin, so a pack's grown pups eventually move out in search of mating opportunities. While they're individualistic, wolf pups, like young humans, learn from their elders. They are steep in pack culture. Wolves have strong emotional attachments. After absences, they greet by standing on their hind legs, a greeting known as a rally. They also interact with a remarkable range of body language and facial expressions. Howling, which is contagious for wolves, is one of their common ways to express their emotional states, and it enables them to recognize distant wolves from the harmonic structure of their voices.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  No one knows how many wolves were in colonial America, but since food determines pup survival, the population of wolves in any given setting rested on food availability. This means that packs competed with one another for prime prey territories. In fact, before Old Worlders arrived, the main mortality in wolves came from other wolves.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Europeans imagined America's wolves as vicious slaughterers of helpless prey. In the real world, something different was playing out. Chasing down and neck wrestling big animals armed with hooves and antlers is dangerous in the extreme. Despite their strong jaw muscles, the geometry of wolves' long muzzles actually inhibits their bite force. So impossible, they go for low-hanging fruit. Highly perceptive about cost-benefit, they scavenge animals already dead. On the hunt, they try for fawns and young animals, or injured diseased or old ones. Their strategy is to test prey in search of those least dangerous and easiest to run down.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Even then, wolf chase success dips as low as 10%.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  One of Western painter George Catlin's memorable observations was about how dearly a wolf pack won a meal. "Even an old or sick buffalo," he wrote, "was a huge and furious animal, and would often deal death by wholesale to his canine assailants," as Catlin put it, "which he is tossing into the air or stamping to death under his feet." Catlin's painting, White Wolves Attacking Buffalo, showed such a scene, with an aging bull fighting a wolf pack with such resolution that, as Catlin wrote, "His eyes were entirely eaten out of his head, the grizzle of his nose was mostly gone,

• 19:21Speaker 02

  his tongue was half eaten off, and the skin and flesh of his legs torn almost literally into strings." Yet even with the bull in that condition, numerous wolves, as Catlin said, "were crushed to death by the feet or horns of the bull." This kind of wolf natural history was invisible to the new colonists, because all the settlers really cared about was fashioning a wolf-free America. In fact, Woods, Massachusetts Colony passed the first environmental law in colonial American history. It was a bounty on the continent's wolves.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 20:32Speaker 04

  When the moments in your life are too important to miss, you can trust O'Reilly Auto Parts to keep you and your plans on the road. Our professional parts people can test your vehicle's battery and even give it a charge if needed. In most cases, we can install your new battery for free. It's just one of the many services we provide at O'Reilly Auto Parts to ensure life's best moments don't find you stranded.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  When you're in the backcountry, don't forget your own backcountry. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. I'm glad to be doing Dude Wipe ads because I buy Dude Wipes anyways. I've been a long time Dude Wipe, I'm a Dude Wipe dude all the time. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild soaking in your butt. You'd never clean your vehicle with dry paper towels, so why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better. So ditch the itch and switch from TP to Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Love them. Like going on a 10-day moose hunt, I just bring a pack along. Not only that, so they're extra large, okay? If you're a little baby, you get little baby wipes. If you're a man, you get Extra Large Dude Wipes. And when you're out in nature, it's going to inevitably cull.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  So make sure you bring along Wet Dude Wipes in three adventure sizes, like Day Hike Single Wipes, 18-pack Weekend Wipers, or for long trips, you got a 48-count pack. And it's not just that. Like when you're out camping, just sleeping in a sleeping bag, let's say you're gone for 10 days, whatever. I use them just to clean up at night, like scrub the old pits, scrub your arms. If it's all dusty, just kind of get your neck and everything cleaned up. I love having them with me. Dude Wipes, it is the best clean pants down. They're available at Amazon, that's where I usually order mine from, is on Amazon. But you get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these boys at Dude Wipes.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  When western travelers like Meriwether Lewis, George Catlin, and John James Audubon first observed wolves in the west, they referred to them as “the shepherds of the buffalo herds.” Josiah Gregg said of plains lobos that “although there were immense numbers of them upon the prairies, their presence in the landscape was often determined by bison herds.” In this regard, western wolves resembled grizzly bears, always found in largest numbers where they could scavenge buffalo drowned in rivers or where weak animals were easier to attack. William Clark observed the most common wolf hunting technique for buffalo in April of

• 23:12Speaker 02

  1805, when Lewis and Clark were ascending the Missouri through what is now North Dakota. Lewis wrote that “Captain Clark informed me that he saw a large drove of buffalo pursued by wolves today, that they at length caught a calf which was unable to keep up with the herd.” An old Pawnee adage, in fact, was that wolves ran down and devoured four out of every ten bison calves born, an ancient American equation that left both species healthy across at least half a million years. One trait everyone commented on when they were first among the west wolves was how tame they were.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Having no reason to fear wolves, native people had long let them hang around camps and villages. So Audubon had marveled at how wolves would lie on the banks as their steamboat passed, yawning at them like dogs. William Clark had an unconcerned wolf walk by so near that he impulsively stabbed it with the bayonet on the muzzle of his rifle. At Fort Union, Audubon's party was met by the American fur company's Alexander Culbertson, whose chief hobby when boredom set in was running down wolves on his Indian pony. As Audubon's companion Edward Harris described it, "With wolves in constant view, the trader

• 24:38Speaker 02

  offered their party a little wolf entertainment." Mr. Culbertson, Harris tells us, started his beautiful black-foot pied mare at full speed when within half a mile of the wolf, who turned and galloped off leisurely until Mr. Culbertson was within 200 or 300 yards of him when he started off at the top of his speed. Within the time it took Harris to scribble his account, Culbertson was back at the post with the wolf draped across the saddle horn, shot through its shoulders as the trader had chased him at breakneck speed across the prairie. It was an impressive performance, no doubt, so long as you hadn't experienced it from the wolf end of the show.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Centuries of peaceful relations with native peoples had taught the West wolves not to fear humans. Despite old-world folklore, Western bar talk, and Hollywood sensationalism today, like Liam Neeson's 2011 film The Grey, the truth is that, except in the rare rabies case, the West wolves were in no way aggressive towards people. In fact, it was a Western trope that both wolves and coyotes were rank cowards around humans. While scornful of canine cowardice, early observers in the West never tired of commenting about how trusting wolves seem to be. Trotting in front of their horses like dogs are sitting and watching curiously as travelers

• 26:08Speaker 02

  pass within feet.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  But soon enough, with everyone traveling the West armed to the teeth and taking shots at almost every wolf they saw, wolves learned to keep their distance. Rifle fire was an initial and casual wolf persecution, but it was merely a hint of the changes about to come in rapid succession across the 19th century. With a wild animal products industry well-established in the West and many thousands of overland migrants crossing the region every year, what should have been canine good times actually ushered in the end game for the wolf West. In 1872, the Brooklyn painter John Gast distilled an important assumption about both Indians

• 26:56Speaker 02

  and the country's wild animals into a famous visual image. Gast's "American Progress" painting portrayed a blond giant in angelic white garb striding across the West, stringing telegraph wires behind her with wagons of settlers in her wake. Disappearing off the edges of the canvas were the native people, but also herds of buffalo and packs of wolves consigned to the margins of the future. Viewers of American Progress seemed to understand, in an America modeled on Europe, not just the native people, but all those iconic wild animals had to go.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Most Americans appeared to assume that, in an America making itself a clone of the old world, a fate of animals like this was inevitable. Buffalo stood first in the rank of those incompatible with civilization. Wolves, well, the plan since colonial times had been their total eradication. Eventually, other animals—grizzly bears, cougars, jaguars, wild horses, eagles, and judging by their reaction to their extinction, even passenger pigeons—joined the ranks of species civilization would not tolerate. Their destruction Gast's painting implied was no one's fault. Simply enough, ancient America's time was over. Incompatibility was a shame, but it seemed to comfort us.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Distilled from the imported nuts of an east India tree, a substance called strychnine ushered in this new order. It became available in America when a firm in Philadelphia began offering cheap packages of strychnine in crystal form in 1834. Since there were few predators left in the east by then, most of the poison went west, sold in bulk in every store and trading post. Naturally, there were no restrictions of any kind on its use. It was cheap, unregulated, and it was lethal chemical warfare. Western travelers used it both to collect pelts and just to see its effects.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  In an age inured to carnage, it was a horrifying killer. Inside a few minutes, a white tablet gulped down from a baited carcass, launched the victim into waves of convulsive cramping. Poisoned wolves died from asphyxiation, but strychnine wrenched the body so violently as to leave a signature death pose: a corpse with a sharply arched spine and a tail frazzled as if the animal had been electrocuted. On the frontier, people who did this for a living were called "wolfers," a western occupation we've probably deliberately left in the dustbin of history so we didn't have to look at it too closely.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Poisoning animals didn't even require a wolfer to be present, and unlike trapping, poisoning didn't call for any sort of skill. You just baited a carcass, or put out chunks of meat laced with poison, and then headed to camp to enjoy life while the strychnine did its work. Teams of wolfers driving ox-drawn wagons began laying out strychnine in the Yellowstone Country as early as 1864. Approaching a buffalo or horse carcass they'd baited, wolfers would start finding victims, appearing sprayed across the landscape as if by some spinning centrifuge a half-mile from their baited animal. The targets were wolves and coyotes, but the poison killed everything interested in

• 30:39Speaker 02

  a rotting piece of meat: eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies, red foxes, gray foxes, swift foxes, tiny kit foxes, skunks.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  As these animals died, their convulsive vomiting sprayed poison across the grass. Poison grass could take out collateral victims like horses. When native people lost ponies this way, they developed a special hatred for wolfers. This kind of poisoning preyed on a wolf's inclination to scavenge and avoid injury in a hunt. An astonishing forty dead wolves per baited carcass was common. One party in the Texas Panhandle picked up sixty-four wolves one morning, barely a mile from their camp. They made $4,000 in one winter.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  In Kansas, James Meade once poisoned eighty-two wolves in a single baiting. In the Texas Panhandle into the 1890s, wolfers Jack Abernathy, Alan Stagg, and Alec Lewis averaged "two hundred monsters," that was their nickname for gray wolves, a year, killing 296 one year on a single giant ranch, the Xit. For more than two decades, wolf and coyote pelts traded as money in the West, worth a dollar apiece and $2 if you could get the pelts all the way to New York. There are no figures for this most disgusting of all wild animal economies, and for good

• 32:12Speaker 02

  reason, it's little remembered in the story of America. But there's every likelihood that from the 1860s through the 1890s, poisoning wildlife for money killed Western animals in numbers that competed with the death tolls of buffalo. For a couple of decades after the Civil War, while US Indian policy herded the tribes under reservations and Western market hunts produced the most devastating slaughter of wildlife in world history, wolves continued to thrive despite strychnine. But with most of their prey animals now erased, wolves were forced to turn to domesticated

• 32:52Speaker 02

  cattle and sheep as prey, except those were the property of ranchers who stood on 8,000 years of history of battling predators.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  So now, as hated symbols of wild America, wolves from the 1880s through the 1920s became special targets in the endgame wolf war. One stockman launched to convert the ancient world they'd acquired into a money-making pasture for cows, sheep, and the market. From the founding of the American colonies through the last decades of the 1800s, bounties paid on wolf scalps became the basic military strategy against wolves. Western stock associations paid bounties in every Western state and territory, and bounties on predators became a primary and acceptable act of governments, too. In Montana, the territorial government

• 33:49Speaker 02

  sometimes used up 2/3 of its annual budgets paying bounties on predators. Between 1883 and 1928, Montana's governments paid bounties on a staggering 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes. Subsidizing both ranchers and wolfers, as late as 1899, the state paid out bounties on a whopping 23,575 wolves. It didn't stop there, or even slow down. The war against wolves and coyotes in Montana

• 34:31Speaker 02

  even produced a state law passed in 1905 ordering veterinarians to infect any wild canines that came their way with sarcoptic mange, then release them to spread the disease among the wild populations. As a result, wild canines in Montana and Wyoming still suffer from a strikingly high mange infection rate even today. With this kind of multi-pronged pressure, wolf populations went under so dramatically that after bountying more than 23,000 wolves in 1899, Montana paid for only 17 dead gray wolves in the year 1920.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  In this ability to kill animals en masse, Americans were absolutely unmatched.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  By the 20th century, ranchers and wolfers were naming the last individual wolves still alive. In Montana, the last one was called "snow drift." In the Dakotas, the last one was "the custer wolf," an animal charged with livestock depredations a T-Rex couldn't have pulled off. At the beginning of the century, a Canadian writer named Ernest Thompson Seton, who had extensive outdoor experience and also employed scientific methodology in his work, tried to take on the huge implications of the new Darwinism in the world around him. Seton moved to New Mexico and began to write books,

• 36:03Speaker 02

  books that strongly appealed to the new century's readers to counter the so-called "nature red in tooth and claw" conclusions that others had drawn from Darwinian evolution. Writers like Seton and Jack London looked for examples among wild creatures of traits humans admired: individuality, compassion, cooperation, loyalty, and an ability to transfer cultural learning across generations. One of Seton's most popular stories employing this approach was about one of those legendary last wolves. In New Mexico's case, a wolf Seton called Lobo "King of Carumpa."

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Lobo was a male wolf Seton had known years before he became a writer, when he was himself a trapper and wolf hunter who had finally captured Lobo. He had done that by baiting his traps with the scent of Lobo's mate, a female wolf the ranchers called Blanca, a beautiful animal Seton had trapped and killed while listening to Lobo howling mournfully in the distance to no reply. As Seton described him, Lolo was an amazingly canny wolf, but with one fatal flaw. That flaw was Lobo's fidelity to his mate. Seton caught Lobo in traps laced with Blanca's scent,

• 37:31Speaker 02

  and the ranchers then hauled Lobo alive to a ranchyard and chained him there as a prize to show the community. Within days, Lobo died, looking off at the New Mexico plains that had been his and Blanca's world.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Lobos and Blancas story first appeared in Seaton's book Wild Animals I Have Known. And it was one of the stories that gave that famous book its running theme. Those in America who celebrated the destruction of the West Wolves sneered, but Seaton's book was pointing towards a different kind of future. The theme of Wild Animals I Have Known, he wrote, was simple. We and the beasts are kin.

• 39:05Speaker 05

  Check engine, ABS or maintenance light on? Take the guesswork out of your warning lights with O'Reilly Veriscan. The service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ASE certified master technicians. And if you need help, we could recommend a shop for you. Ask for O'Reilly Veriscan today.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  When you're in the backcountry, don't forget your own backcountry. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along wet, extra-large dude wipes. I'm glad to be doing dude wipe ads because I buy dude wipes. Anyways, I've been a long time dude wipe. I'm a dude wipe dude all the time. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild soaking in your butt. You'd never clean your vehicle with dry paper towels. Why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better. So ditch the itch and switch from TP to wet extra large dude wipes. Love them. Like going on a 10 day moose hunt, I just bring a pack along. Not only that, so they're extra large. Okay. If you're a little baby, you get little baby wipes. If you're a man, you get extra large dude wipes.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  And when you're out in nature, it's going to inevitably call. So make sure you bring along wet dude wipes in three adventure sizes. Like day hike, single wipes, 18 pack weekend wipers. Or, you know, for long trips, you got a 48 count pack. And it's not just that, like when you're out camping, just sleeping in a sleeping bag, let's say you're gone for 10 days, whatever. I use them just to clean up at night, like, you know, scrub the old pits, scrub your arms. If it's all dusty, just kind of get your neck and everything cleaned up. I love having them with me. Dude wipes, it is the best clean pants down. They're available at Amazon. That's where I usually order mine from is on Amazon. But you get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these boys at Dude Wipes.

• 41:06Speaker 06

  So Dan, thing about wolves, one of the points that you raise in this episode is that the perception of wolves

• 41:16Speaker 06

  coming from the old world doesn't match up with the reality of wolves in the new world.

• 41:22Speaker 06

  And it got me thinking about when we were working on our long hunter project and our mountain man project. We do have instances of guys being bitten by wolves. And it's always when they're sleeping around a campfire and I had sort of read that.

• 41:36Speaker 06

  As we're working on it, I'd read that as like evidence of wolves being all over the place and, and just a presence on the landscape. And then in light of your episode, it caused me to rethink it. These wolves are sneaking in and, and you know, they're not super aggressive. They're just approaching guys when they're asleep.

• 42:01Speaker 06

  I don't know that there's a question there necessarily, but I mean. The long hunter instance, it was a rabid wolf. Yeah, and there's, there's.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  There's a rabid wolf and a mountain man at one of the rendezvous too.

• 42:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  There's a wolf that runs around at a rendezvous in the 1830s and bites people.

• 42:18Speaker 06

  I guess it strikes me because you read, you read accounts from those periods and you're like, wow, wolves were everywhere. Wolves were biting people. And then when you take a step back and you sort of contextualize it with how many wolves there were, there are sort of these rare, very rare instances that jump out to us. But in, in the grand scheme of things, the wolves are pretty much off on their own and. Yeah, you can find guy after guy after guy after guy that gets tore up by a grizzly bear. Yeah. No guys are getting tore up by wolves.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Right. No, they're not. And, uh, I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to include that quote from, uh, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and this is in William Woods's, uh, book that he publishes in 1632, when he's running through the accounts of all these new animals that are in the Americas.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  He makes that, that statement that I, as far as I can find, remains true all through American history, certainly through the, the West and the West wolves. He makes that statement that there has not been an instance where a wolf has set upon a man or a woman in our colony. And he's already said, there are wolves around all over the place, but there has not been an instance. And the reason he said that, I'm pretty certain, is because these people came out of Western Europe. For one thing, England hadn't had wolves since the 1400s.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  So there have been multiple generations of people who, the only thing they know about wolves is, you know, these fairy tales and folk tales that they've heard handed down is.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  They are expecting, once they hear that there are wolves in North America, that wolves are going to be tearing people limb from limb. And suddenly, the reality is, wow. There's not been a single instance where a wolf has set upon a man or a woman in our experience. And that's kind of what tracks through the story here, especially in the West. What most people in the 19th century, in the West especially, after they had had generations of this kind of interaction with wolves. What their reaction to wolves was is, wolves are cowards. Wolves are not aggressive and are going to attack you. They're cowards.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  And that became the denigration that people levied against them. You know, the native people think of them as, boy, wolves are these wonderful animals. They're loyal to their families and, you know, and they're brave. And, and the European, Euro-American perspective was because the wolves were not of aggressive, they're a bunch of cowards. And that's, that's how they, that's how they respond.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  There's a lot of, uh, I hesitate to say evidence because I don't know that I've seen it in evidentiary form. You hear people say that the wolves of Europe, the wolves in Romania, wolves in other places, that it's a, there is a, there's a legacy of greater aggression.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Um, and like a higher propensity to attack people with some of these Eurasian wolves. More livestock depredation. Do you know that, do you know that to be true or is that, is that not true?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  I know that that's what's thought to be true. That's what the folklore of the wolf is, has always been. And that folklore was brought to America. So that's one of the, you know, and it's still, I mean, I encounter people, you know, when I was living in the Bitterroot Valley, uh, back a decade ago, I had a neighbor who, when, uh, wolves were recovering in the Sapphire Mountains right above us, and I would occasionally see a pack run across the road as I would come home from a graduate class at night at 10 o'clock, pack of wolves would run across the road. I could go outside, uh, usually two or three times a year and I'd hear wolves howl. I had a neighbor who had grown up in California who walked up to the house one day and said something like, well, I guess

• 46:35Speaker 02

  you know that these wolves are probably, I mean, we're in mortal danger. These wolves are close and these things, they're gonna tear my wife off the front porch and, and maul her in the yard. I can't let my son and his granddaughter come over because I know they're gonna get my granddaughter. And, you know, I was trying to tell him,

• 46:56Speaker 01

  They haven't, they haven't got, man, the truth. Haven't got anybody.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  They haven't, there's no, but it did not work. I told him that and I could tell he was completely unconvinced. And so these stories, I mean, they go obviously back a long way into the old world. I mean, they are still current with us where, you know, and I went to a wolf conference in Southern New Mexico in Las Cruces one time about 20 years ago, and there was a woman who was representing the livestock industry who showed our assemblé throng of an audience of 250 people or so, how deadly Mexican wolves were and how scary they were to have them on the ground. And what she showed us was a photograph

• 47:40Speaker 02

  of a cowboy in full chaps and hat and everything, his boots, running towards a front porch, running towards the photographer, and he's really balling the jack. And back in the background, maybe a hundred yards away, so far away, she had to draw a circle around it to make sure that the audience saw it, was a wolf standing in the road. And she said, this is an example of how bloodthirsty these wolves are. Had he not run for the porch, this wolf was gonna pull him down.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  And it's a wolf standing curiously in the road, watching a cowboy in chaps run up the, up the dirt road.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  There's a great way of looking at the risk, um, and you see it with grizzly bears, and it'd be interesting to look at it with. Contemporary Europe, you know, or Eurasian countries that have wolves would be like, what are the odds that in a given year, any individual

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  X will have a violent altercation with a human, you know, and then when you look at like the, the menagerie of North American wildlife, it's like grizzlies are

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Grizzlies.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Are, are

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Mountain lions.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, are, are, well,

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Grizzlies are high and everybody else is kind of like inconsequential, but I would be curious to know, like if the Europe, if that European sensibility, which you see cited all the time when it talks about Amer- the American, the immediate American hatred of wolves coming from this big, bad wolf in Europe thing, um, it'd just be interesting to look at and be like, was it any more, was it any more true in Europe than here, or was it just as untrue there as it was here about the human health risk with wolves?

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Not the inconvenience of livestock, but the health risk.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  I think, you know, and there's a guy who's, who's written a, a recent book, which I just blurbed uh, for him on Europe's wolves. And what he did was there was a wolf uh, in Romania that uh, tracked sort of a, you know, one of these single uh, colonizing wolves that tracked uh, three or 400 miles from Southern, Southeastern Europe towards uh, France. And this guy, uh, a couple of years later went out and he walked that exact route that this wolf, wolf had taken and wrote a book about it. And one of the things he said that struck me, because I didn't know this, Europe now has more wolves in it than the United States does.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  The United States accepting Alaska, the lower forty-eight. Europe has more wolves than the lower forty-eight. And Europe is attempting to be as welcoming of wolves as possible. Now, obviously, according to this guy's journey, he was running into people, you know, every few days who were outraged, just as a lot of Montana ranchers are outraged, that there were wolves returning to Europe. And so some of those same sensibilities. But it's going to require somebody doing a book to try to find whether or not evidence actually exists. Because some of the things I've read about wolf attacks in Europe are, well, okay, so there's always the rabid animal that's, you know, that could be involved.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  And there were evidently a lot of wolf-dog hybrids. Yeah. And those animals, at least some people have argued, may have been responsible for some of the attacks that have... So anyway, it's that kind of story. And then, obviously, in the nineteenth century, when people are coming west, I mean, what I tried to get across in this episode is that, hell, wolves have been, they had been in the West and in America for five million years. All of the wildlife, the way trees and grass grew, was sort of dependent on there being this keystone predator at the top of everything.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  So it's a little bit like taking the beavers out, or taking the sea otters out. When you do that, the ecologies start scrambling and changing because you've got in place this animal that's been there for millions of years. Yeah. And producing its effect on the world. And yet, you know, we come from the old world with this kind of wolf hostility, and our task immediately is to try to get rid of them as just as fast as we can.

• 52:13Speaker 06

  I think one thing that I've gotten from your work in terms of just how I conceptualize and certain animals is this relationship between coyotes and wolves. And they look alike, but there's obvious differences. But this idea that, you know, wolves go up, coyotes go down, foxes go up. And it's sort of this continuous balancing act between these. I don't know if you can sort of talk about the coyote story because that's obviously an area of expertise, but how that relates to the wolf story because there's some interesting parallels. But then obviously those two animals, their histories diverge in very clear ways.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I've done, obviously, the Old Man America episode on, you know, the native stories about coyote with a capital C as the deity figure. And I'm going to do one more episode later in the year that's going to be about the sort of the coyote story. Because the coyote, unlike wolves, Europeans had no familiarity with coyotes. And so they didn't actually know what to think about them. And it took, you know, some time. It took particularly, you know, Mark Twain in roughing it, sort of giving Americas, Americans an idea of how to think about coyotes.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  And it was not a favorable appraisal, unfortunately. But coyotes and wolves obviously go back a long way. They are closely related. They can hybridize. Although, one of the interesting things that's happening these days is that coyotes will readily hybridize and the wolves will too with eastern wolves and red wolves, but not gray wolves. And so the gray wolves that are in the West seem to be sort of mortal enemies of coyotes. And we have some explanations for that, and I can talk about them a little later in the series. But they're closely related, they're related enough to hybridize.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  But I had a biologist at the Predator Research Facility in Logan, Utah, tell me one time that they had deliberately induced a pregnancy in a coyote with wolf sperm. And when she had this litter.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  She immediately killed every one of them.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. She killed every one of them within a day.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Her own pups.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Her hatred of wolves was greater than her love of her own children.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, her love of her own pups. Yeah.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Like the end of a book.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  I'll read that to my kids at night.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, they'll love that, no doubt.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  And she ate them.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know, I mean, one of the stories I obviously told in this, this particular episode is about the Wolfers, which is a, and I, you know, have to observe that's not a sort of a Western figure that has made it into Hollywood movies.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  But holy cow, these guys, they killed untold thousands of animals and not just wolves because the baits, the strychnine baits they were putting out, they were killing everything that came and took the baits. So they were killing eagles and ravens and hawks and skunks and raccoons and foxes and coyotes and, you know, and also wolves.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Can I tell you another interesting bycatch they would get?

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  In Life and Death at the Mouth of the Muscle Shell, which is like a trader's journal.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Uh, they, it seems like when they get little free time, like the guys in this little community, which is now under the waters of Fort Peck Reservoir. They, they kind of like, as they get a minute or they get the right amount of drunk or whatever, it's decided they'll go and lace some baits. You know, just like a fall, like nothing else, nothing better to do, sort of fallback is lace and baits.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  In it, he talks about, I can't even remember what tribe it is. They come in pissed because they've lost 24 of their dogs to a bait.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  And they want to raise it, they want to raise a fuss about it.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Indian horses too died of strychnine poisoning because wolves and coyotes would vomit the strychnine onto the grass and Indian pony herds would, if they happened to be herded in that spot and eating that grass, horses would suddenly die from being killed by strychnine.

• 56:56Speaker 06

  What's the, this might be too technical, what's the half-life or whatever the appropriate term would be of strychnine?

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Strychnine?

• 57:03Speaker 06

  It seems like one of the, like a heavy metal almost that is just sort of accumulates and yeah, like where does it end? The horse eats the grass, then the horse dies, then the coyote comes and gets the horse.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wish I could answer that question. I don't really know, but I do think it remains toxic, you know, exposed above ground in a, in a form that another animal can, can get for quite a while.

• 57:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  Well, one last question for you on this. Dire wolves have been in the news, colossal bioscience, colossal biosciences where you are on the conservation advisory board, they've taken, um, they've identified some dire wolf genes, I believe 19, um, and were able to put them, combine them with a gray wolf and then use surrogate pups to birth some.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  And it's sparked this huge debate of how, you know, when they, when, when someone declares it a dire wolf, it's like, what does it require to say an animal is what it is? Does it have to pass the look test? Does it have to pass a genetic purity marker? Like, like who gets to say that that's what that is? And you and I had talked before about, um, even if you had, if you knew you had the complete animal, how do you account for the culture?

• 58:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's the, to me, the whole thing. And yeah, we have talked about it, Steve, because.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  Animals have culture and so particularly for social animals like wolves. I mean, they teach their pups what the potential prey is, how to function in a landscape. And these are animals that these, these dire wolves, if that's what we can call them, that are not going to have any culture to rely on. The culture they're going to be taught basically is whatever their human handlers are exposing them to. You know, and the other thing about this, I mean, this is a, as you and I both know and have talked about, this is a, a kind of a genetic experiment to see if it's possible to de-extinct an animal.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  And canids appear to be easier to do this with than anything else. And so that's why Colossal ended up doing this wolf experiment to begin with. Uh, but you can't really say that these animals ultimately are dire wolves. They're, they're wolves that are going to have some dire wolf genetics and we're going to get a chance to see. I mean, one of the things obviously that these genetic, these spliced in genes have done is they've produced animals that are white. And that's one of the arguments that dire wolves probably had white coats, particularly thick white coats. And these animals have that. I think the next test I'm going to be interested in is to see exactly how big they get.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Because our perception, particularly from La Brea tar pits, where there are just hundreds of dire wolf skulls available from dire wolves that were caught in the tar there, is that dire wolves were probably about 25, 30% larger than gray wolves. Which means if these animals get to adulthood and they do express dire wolf genetics, I mean, they're going to weigh 160, 165 pounds or something. So that's going to be, I think, an interesting test to see. Uh, I, I don't know how it's going to turn out, but it's a very fascinating.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  It's, it's been worth it just for the debate and the conversation that it's inspired about.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  No kidding.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  About wildlife and the role of wildlife and extinction. Um, my first date with my wife, my very first date. We went to La Brea Tar Pit.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  You did.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  And they have a display on the wall of seventy five dire wolf skulls. And I have a skull shelf in my house that was inspired by the, it's not lit the same way, but it was inspired.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  Inspired by that.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Inspired by that. And I got in trouble on my first date because we want, you know, they play those movies on Cir- Circle. Well, I'm sitting there and we come in and we're watching the end half of a movie and I found myself explaining. So what we'll do is we'll watch the end half. And then it'll start over and we'll just watch up to where.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Where you had started.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  She's like, oh, that, that, this is how that, that's how this works. Oh, thank you for.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Thank you for explaining. I was totally lost as to how we were gonna see the whole movie.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Thanks for helping me out. I just couldn't visualize how this is gonna work.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Well, guys, thanks for all the great questions. Yeah, this has, this has been great fun as always.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  You ever get that feeling, the walls closing in, the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe in a spot all your own. Well, head over to land.com. They've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage. You can search by location. You can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com. It is where the adventure begins.

• 1:02:49Speaker 07

  Whether you're hiking in before first light or crawling back into camp after a long day of field, a hot meal, or a strong cup of coffee can make the difference. The Jetboil Flash boils water in minutes and packs down small, making it an easy addition to your hunting kit. A lot of times on a hard hunt, I'll take a Jetboil with me even if I'm not staying overnight just because I want to have a midday coffee break or have a midday hot meal when I bring some dehydrated food. Fast, compact, efficient. Jetboil helps you stay fueled for whatever the day brings. Use code Grease at jetboil.com for 15% off your order. Some exclusions apply.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  When you're in the backcountry, don't forget your own backcountry. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild soaking your butt. You'd never clean your vehicle with dry paper towels, so why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better. So ditch the itch and switch from TP to Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Dude wipes, it is the best clean pants down. They're available at Amazon, that's where I usually order mine from, but you can get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these boys at Dude Wipes.