Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 37: The Wolf Returns to the West | The American West About this episode One of the stories that will long define the American West in the modern era is the return of the wolf after a century of wholesale attempts to obliterate it. From New Mexico to Montana and west to the Pacific Coast, a five-million year-old native is on its way home again.
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1:29 Speaker 02 The return of gray wolves, Mexican wolves, and red wolves to the West is an unfolding history yet to play out, but it's a watershed in the Western story. I'm Dan Florys, and this is The American West.
2:05 Speaker 02 The Wolf Returns to the West.
2:10 Speaker 02 Stepping ashore in the early 1600s, we old-worlders were bitter to discover wolves were abundant in America. That's truly curious if you know human history, since thousands of generations of us had watched and learned from wolves for half a million years or more. Domesticated wolves were our first companion animals, our oldest animal helpmates, our templates for domestication. Because as hunters, both humans and wolves saw so much of themselves in the other. But there were handed-down memories that were more recent.
2:49 Speaker 02 In Eurasia, wild wolves ceased to be our blood brothers when 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, we started taming and herding ungulates. Native people in America never took that step with bison or bighorn sheep or pronghorns. And consequently, they lived among wolves without animals, continuing to admire and learn from them, seeking them as totems. But Europeans landed in America with all their past centuries of wolf hatred at full boil, plus a recent memory of success at eradicating wolves in places like the British Isles.
3:30 Speaker 02 There was also that shepherd's religion we brought with us, which calls something else into play. Inferences from the Bible were that wolves were a part of the fallen earth Adam and his progeny inherited when he was expelled from the garden. Looking deeply into a wolf's eyes could also be a disconcerting reminder of something good Judeo-Christians tried their best to avoid thinking about. To paraphrase the British ecologist Melanie Challenger...
4:01 Speaker 02 The Earth was now dominated by an animal who was doing his best to convince himself and everyone else that he was not actually an animal. That animal origin we share with wolves is one reason they make us so anxious. In his 1920s novel, Steppenwolf, the German writer Hermann Hesse put the matter this way: "He calls himself part wolf, part man, with the man he packs in everything spiritual and sublimated, or even cultivated to be found in himself, and with the wolf all that is instinctive, savage, chaotic." As a good European, Hesse didn't understand enough about wolves to reference their real
4:45 Speaker 02 emotional lives, their loyalty and tenderness to packs and mates and offspring. But he knew that wolves remind us of the animal nature we humans deny or believe we've escaped. That was a problem for us, but much more of a problem for wolves. Except in Alaska, by the mid-20th century, we Americans had endangered all our wolves everywhere. Federal wolf killers Stanley Young and E.A. Goldman's famous book, The Wolves of North America, proudly proclaimed victory by the 1940s.
5:26 Speaker 02 By then, wolves were entirely gone in the east, from New England to Virginia. The Rocky Mountain states with all their public lands barely held 100 wolves. California's last wolves were down to fewer than 50. There were only 60 Mexican wolves left in the southwest. The only places in the Lower 48 that still had sizable wolf populations were the Upper Great Lakes country and the mid-south. By the mid-20th century, the Upper Midwest still had 1,400 gray wolves and the mid-south 450 red wolves. But those numbers were all quickly falling.
6:09 Speaker 02 For Americans born after World War II, living in a country without wolves now became normal. That was certainly the case for me. From a generation born in an America with no wild buffalo on the prairies, no passenger pigeon in the skies, no wolves in the forest. The wolf warriors were finally succeeding in making America over in the image of England or France. Centuries of unquestioned wolf hatred had worked. So-called civilization was now at hand.
6:47 Speaker 02 There was one exception to this sad tale of wolf disappearance in the Lower Forty-Eight.
6:53 Speaker 02 Back in 1959, inspired by Adolf Muri's The Wolves of Mount McKinley, a young graduate student from working-class roots named David Meck conducted the first of three winters of field trips to a 210-square-mile island in Lake Superior. Isle Royale had become a national park in 1940, and Meck's project was to study an ongoing natural history experiment there. In the early 1900s, moose had swum from lake shorelines out to the island.
7:31 Speaker 02 Lacking predators, their numbers predictably underwent two massive eruptions and then die-offs. Then, in 1949, gray wolves somehow got to Isle Royale from the mainland, probably by crossing the winter-frozen lake. Like Adolf Muri, Meck did the kind of wolf study others dreamed of, getting to see firsthand an evolving ecological interaction. At the time, a few hundred wolves remained in the Upper Midwest, most of them in Minnesota. The Fish and Wildlife Service would declare this Midwestern wolf population officially threatened by 1978.
8:15 Speaker 02 When Meck's The Wolves of Isle Royale appeared as a National Parks publication in 1966, his insights spread through the scientific community. Adolf Muri had been right. Wolves mostly killed the young, the injured, and the very old of their prey. But there was more. Meck was the first naturalist to report how difficult the life of a wolf really was. Although Isle Royale's wolves killed and ate beavers, almost their entire focus was on big ungulates. Wolves did not survive on rabbits or mice. Yet of the moose they pursued,
8:58 Speaker 02 even big wolf packs succeeded in making kills only 8% of the time. For many readers, Meck's insights induced a newfound understanding and compassion for the life of a wolf. For ecology, Meck's Isle Royale study was one more piece of hard evidence buttressing the scientific view that wolves were critical to healthy ecologies. So by the 1960s, our best natural scientists were telling us we'd been wrong to impose a myopic Old World wolf war in America. The science of ecology was showing that the continent's ancient top predators
9:42 Speaker 02 had shaped everything about America's natural history. From the way other predators, like cougars or coyotes or foxes, functioned, to what kinds of prey animals there were and how many, down to the numbers of beavers in the streams, the songbirds in the valleys, the kinds of trees and grass that grew. If America's valued and wanted modern, healthy versions of old-time America's ecologies, we were going to have to take a number of measures from creating a wilderness preservation system to bringing wolves back. Ecologist Aldo Leopold's land ethic almost came down to a single, delimited insight.
10:26 Speaker 02 Imagining a biologically healthy America meant we had to start thinking like wild mountains that had wolves in them again.
10:42 Speaker 02 In 1967, with the Endangered Species Act of 1966 on the books, both the eastern timber wolf and the red wolf, ancient native animals whose genetics and cultural knowledge we were in danger of losing, were listed as endangered species. The western gray wolf was also listed in 1967, then relisted in 1973 when Congress passed and Richard Nixon signed into law the Grand Endangered Species Act of that year. U.S. Fish and Wildlife also relisted both eastern and red wolves within a week of the 1973 Act taking effect.
11:27 Speaker 02 The southwestern subspecies of gray wolf, the by then perilously scarce Mexican wolf, acquired its listing as a U.S. endangered species in 1976. Listing was the prelude to recovery. In the 1980s, the Fish and Wildlife Service began to finalize plans for restoring wolves to the Lower 48th Western Public Lands under the umbrella of the Endangered Species Act's recovery mandate. By then, a majority of Americans was beginning to internalize a changing attitude towards wolves.
12:10 Speaker 02 Wealthier, better educated, and younger Americans, Westerners and Alaskans among them, were becoming wolf advocates. In the wake of Canadian writer Farley Moat's book, Never Cry Wolf, and the charming movie Disney made of it, many became downright enchanted with wolves, even if biologists snickered that no wolves actually lived the way Never Cry Wolf's animals did.
12:40 Speaker 02 Ranchers, older Americans, people without college degrees, folks who lived rurally, and many hunters who for decades had grown used to artificial, incomplete ecologies that left them as the only predators, thought the idea of recovering wolves was batshit crazy. The animals' new human allies must be little more than wolf-loving hippies, they thought. This was a divide that predicted a politicized future in a West that was fast sifting itself out as an old West and a new West, each with very different values.
13:25 Speaker 02 America's wolf recovery moment, everywhere faced complications both practical and bizarre. For starters, there were those who didn't believe either red wolves or Mexican gray wolves actually existed. The red wolf, an animal whose range began in the western parts of Texas and Oklahoma and extended eastward and northward to Florida and New England, looked suspiciously like a long-legged coyote. Was it merely a gray wolf-coyote hybrid? As for the Mexican wolf, it seemed barely distinguishable among the bewildering
14:04 Speaker 02 two dozen wolf subspecies 20th-century canid zoology had offered up. But early in the 21st century, the genetic revolution changed what we thought we knew about wolves, and biologists drastically pruned the canid tree. In 2012, U.S. Fish and Wildlife issued a peer-reviewed monograph offering an entire rethinking of speciation among America's wolves.
14:32 Speaker 02 An account of the taxonomy of North American wolves claimed that the red wolves and timber wolves of Eastern America were not gray wolves, but ancient continental wolves out of an indigenous line that had also produced coyotes. Coyotes, Canis rufus and Canis lycion, are modern representatives of a major and diverse clade that evolved within North America, the monograph read. The new study concluded that modern gray wolves returned to their evolutionary home
15:11 Speaker 02 in America from Eurasia some 20,000 years ago, arriving here in three different waves, the last wave of which had brought Mexican wolves to the southwest. This taxonomy finally explained a phenomenon biologists had first confronted in the 1960s. In the West, gray wolf coyote hybridization was rare, if it occurred at all. The animals seemed to detest one another. But as the West predator war drove coyotes to colonize across the country, canid stand-offishness in the West turned into hook-up willingness in the East.
15:55 Speaker 02 In Louisiana and Texas and along the Canadian border, coyotes interbreeding with remnant wolves produced a new, quite successful Eastern canid many would call coy wolves. Maybe the appearance of animals like this in the East really was, as one New Yorker put it, "the end of civilization." But coyote-wolf hybridization was making a version of wolf recovery possible in an East that had lacked wolves since the 1930s.
16:30 Speaker 02 Coyote hybridization with red wolves in places like Texas, however, threatened to become an ESA crisis. What if the red wolf wasn't actually a species, but just a coyote with gray wolf genes? In my early teens, I was lucky enough to witness what were unmistakably coyotes arriving in the Red River Valley of Louisiana. But on two occasions, I came face to face with leggy, golden-eyed animals that looked awfully wolfy to a 15-year-old. If coyotes and red wolf coyote hybrids were swamping red wolf genetics, much as we humans had once done with Neanderthals, that mixture sure made for beautiful animals.
17:16 Speaker 02 But by 1970, Ron Nowak, another Louisianian who eventually became Fish and Wildlife's endangered species guru, figured that from Texas eastward, there were at most only 300 red wolves left.
17:36 Speaker 02 After blessedly rejecting a dog fence, hundreds of miles long, reminiscent of the dingo fence across Australia for keeping migrating hybrids and coyotes away from red wolves, in 1973, biologist Curtis Carley, the field coordinator for the Red Wolf Recovery Team, tried another approach to save red wolves. Carley came up with a template using skeletal morphology and recorded howls to try to identify actual red wolves for placement in a captive breeding program. His method for identifying a true red wolf wasn't exactly rocket science.
18:19 Speaker 02 But in 1974, the recovery team set up facilities at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, to breed the wolves he'd selected to save the red wolf from extinction. Carley's team had examined animals believed to be red wolves in 50 different zoos. And had identified but a single animal they thought was a pure red wolf. They then shocked zoo personnel by insisting that every animal they had catalogued as a coyote red wolf hybrid ought to be destroyed. Carley's Trappers caught another 400 canids in the wild, but of those, only 10% made the cut.
19:02 Speaker 02 Ultimately, they concluded they had found just 14 animals out of 450 to begin red wolf recovery. All those others, betrayed by the sin of miscegenation and coyote blood, were destroyed. But red wolf recovery was now underway in places far from coyotes. And in 1987, red wolves were released in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and on the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. Routinely shot and hit by cars, red wolves were soon removed from Great Smoky Mountains Park.
19:44 Speaker 02 While they're still present on the Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina, the wild population today has dropped to a mere 25 animals, making America's red wolves the most endangered wolf species on earth. Returning them to their original range in the West now seems remote. Recently, though, researchers have discovered wild canids on the Louisiana-Texas border that still carry as much as 10% red wolf ancestry and infrequently as much as 75%. These so-called ghost wolves include red wolf genetics not found in the 14 animals that
20:29 Speaker 02 founded the Carolina lines. It gives me a secret thrill, I'll confess, to know that those long-legged, yellow-eyed hybrids I saw as a teenager are still out there. With luck, we may be able to add in their genes to create healthier red wolves.
20:50 Speaker 02 As for Mexican wolves, their recovery commenced in the late 1970s with issues that seemed similarly unsurmountable. The problem was that we'd been too effective in wiping them out. There were almost no Mexican wolves left. Certainly no packs that might be captured and transplanted. The best guess was that maybe five wild Mexican wolves remained alive on either side of the border in the 1970s. But between 1978 and 1980, a federal predator hunter named Roy McBride, working in Mexico, managed to capture three males
21:34 Speaker 02 and in a wild stroke of luck, a 10-year-old pregnant female he named Nina. Eventually, the breeding program acquired two more wolf lines from captive animals, the Ghost Ranch and Aragon lineages. But Mexican wolf recovery faced the hurdle of a genetic bottleneck of only three lines of animals. So trappers scoured nearby Mexico for a few more animals to try to diversify this small gene pool.
22:12 Speaker 02 When Fish and Wildlife released its recovery plan in 1982, a new problem surfaced. No one in the southwest seemed to want the animals. The Reagan administration actually told target states they could say no, and at least one state did so. Big Ben National Park was a prime release site, but Texas leaped at a chance to make wolves forever unwelcome in the Lone Star State. The best New Mexico could do was to offer up the military bombing range north of White Sands National Monument. Or at least it did so until stock interests persuaded the state to withdraw even that possibility.
22:56 Speaker 02 But after first equivocating, Arizona eventually proffered the Blue Range, a large national forest primitive area east of Phoenix that merged into the famous Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, a wild locale that satisfied both southwestern states.
23:18 Speaker 02 A key move in releasing Mexican wolves into the wild was labeling the population "experimental and non-essential," meaning the wolves would not have full endangered species protections. Another key move came when Hank Fisher of Defenders of Wildlife told Southwestern Stockman that his group would pay market compensation for any livestock wolves killed. So the nearly unbelievable moment came in March of 1998 when released pandas high in the Blue Mountains opened and 11 Mexican wolves loped off to be wild wolves once more.
24:03 Speaker 02 Amidst all the sound and fury, at least wolves were finally back in the evolutionary homeland of Earth's canids. In 2018, a genetic tour de force by the National Academy of Sciences finally gave both Mexican and red wolves full legitimacy: the Mexican wolf as a viable subspecies distinct from other gray wolves, and the red wolf as a true ancient species and not merely a coyote- gray wolf hybrid. While Mexican wolf recovery struggled for years, and their genetic diversity is still
24:48 Speaker 02 not high, in 2026, there are nearly 300 wild Mexican wolves roaming the Southwest. In 2015, a new ESA rule enlarged their recovery zone to extend to the boundaries of Texas and California on east and west, then strangely chose Interstate 40, which tracks across the Southwest from Amarillo to Kingman, Arizona, as the northern perimeter. A new recovery plan in 2017 confirmed those boundaries and set the maximum Mexican wolf population at 325 animals.
25:31 Speaker 02 A couple of years ago, I asked Dave Parsons, Mexican wolf recovery coordinator from 1990 to 1999, for his thoughts on the future of Mexican wolves. Dave essentially agreed with the Center for Biological Diversity. Mexican wolves ought to be allowed to expand their range to the Grand Canyon and into the Southern Rockies for a healthy Mexican wolf population of 750 animals across the Southwest. But, as he put it, "I don't expect to see that in my lifetime."
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27:38 Speaker 02 The wolf recovery that thrilled people across the world, unspooled to international headlines in the Northern Rocky Mountains. I was living in Montana at the time it happened with a girlfriend who worked for Hank Fisher and Defenders of Wildlife, so I had a front row seat for what seemed the game of the century. Prior to this moment, the last time anyone had seen a wolf, even in our one wildlife park, Yellowstone, was 1926. But soon after endangered species legislation passed in the 1960s, biologists in various agencies and universities began conferring about how to get wolves back.
28:24 Speaker 02 The 1975 Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan identified Yellowstone and Glacier Parks, along with the biggest wilderness area in the Lower 48, Montana's Bitterroot Mountains west into Idaho, as the logical recovery zones. The plan released 15 wolves a year for five years, until there were at least 10 breeding pairs in each zone. Before human-assisted wolf recovery in the Rocky Mountains proceeded, though, something happened that has now become a general principle of western wolf recovery. On their own, wolves began recolonizing the West.
29:08 Speaker 02 The Canadian war on wolves had not pursued every wolf in its vast wildlands. And in 1979, a Canadian female wolf researcher named Kishanina established a territory on the northwest edge of Glacier Park. The next year, a big male called a bear paw wolf created consternation on Montana's Rocky Mountain front, and a Montana hunter quickly killed that wolf dead. But in 1986, Glaciers Wolves, the American press named “The Magic Pack,” whelped
29:47 Speaker 02 the first litter of wolf pups born in a western U.S. national park since the 1920s. In the early 1990s, wolves dinned farther south, in the Nine Mile Valley near Missoula, Montana. Someone promptly shot the radio collared female. The surviving male managed to get their pups to almost six months old before he was hit by a car on the nearby interstate. These colonizing wolves complicated recovery plans as much as rancher outrage did, since
30:26 Speaker 02 wolves recovering naturally in the U.S. would be endangered species with full protection under the ESA. The same livestock industry that had moved heaven and earth to have wolves wiped out in the first place, and used to having its way in the West for more than a century, was now in an uproar. Few western ranchers were willing to try coexistence with wolves. Some acted as if recovering wolves repudiated their entire history. So the 1993 Compromise for Northern Rockies Wolf Recovery designated “human-released
31:06 Speaker 02 wolves” as experimental, non-essential animals, which meant that ranchers or federal wildlife services hunters could kill wolves that attacked livestock. Regional and national hearings over western wolf recovery produced the most public comment ever logged on any American environmental proposal. And they showed a changed America. Eighty percent of those comments were in favor of wolf recovery.
31:46 Speaker 02 During the second week of a cold 1995 Montana January, the first eight gray wolves captured in the Alberta Rockies came through Missoula, bound for acclimatization pens in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley. Three days later, four of the first wolves headed for Idaho were blessed by the nest purse on the tarmac of the Missoula Airport, then trucked to Salmon, Idaho for hard release in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Meanwhile, in Yellowstone, two packs bred in their pens that February, so pups were on the way.
32:29 Speaker 02 On the spring equinox, March 21 of 1995, Yellowstone's new wolves sniffed at the open doors on their enclosure, then bounded one after the other into the nearby trees. In 1995 and 1996, Yellowstone released 41 wolves into the park and another 35 wolves were released in Idaho. Word was that the 25,000 elk on Yellowstone's northern range, animals that had survived a recent eruption and then a die-off, were suddenly nervous as hell, and with good reason. Four years after that first pack,
33:14 Speaker 02 appropriately named the Leopold Pack, formed in Yellowstone, a denning pair of wolves bore pups in the Bitterroot Valley where I lived. Not long after that, a three-mile pack emerged in the Sapphire Mountains just above my place. As the 21st century dawned, for the first time in my life, I was hearing wolf howls in the evening dukes, spotting wolf tracks in the mud of the local creek, and in silvery winter moonlight, occasionally seeing shadowy, canid forms loping across the hills as I drove home at night. It was an exciting time to be alive.
33:58 Speaker 02 We Europeans had been killing wolves for 8,000 years in the Old World. For the past 400 years, our ancestors had erased wolves in America from coast to coast. Now, the science of ecology and the national will had brought us to a new place of respect for the deep-time history of America, for our continent's uniqueness, and a recognition of the wrong-headedness of trying to make America into a carbon copy of the Old World.
34:35 Speaker 02 Of course, all this is far from over. The wolf story that's loomed over America's relationship to nature for the past four centuries continues, if anything, even more politicized now and even more complex. Gray wolves in the Northern Rockies are especially noteworthy as pawns and victims of America's cultural and political battles. Under federal direction, the gray wolves in the vast wildlands of the Northern Rockies became a worldwide example of charismatic wildlife recovery. By 2021, there were more than 2,000 gray wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.
35:16 Speaker 02 From the perspective of ecologists and most of the international public, a wildlife story on a par with saving bald eagles under the Endangered Species Act. Even with private, then-state compensation programs to pay for stock losses, plus the ability to remove problem wolves, ranchers in several states nonetheless persuaded rural communities around them to proclaim local emergencies over wolves. Many in the hunting community, that bulwark of saving wildlife a century before, grew resentful that they were having to share elk and deer with the West's original predators.
35:57 Speaker 02 In 2025, the president of Montana Trappers claimed that the presence of wolves had created what he called "the greatest loss of hunting opportunity in the world." History, as in the market slaughter of wild animals in the same 19th-century West, obviously wasn't his strong suit. The intent of endangered species recovery has always been to return management of recovered species to the states of their residence. And by act of the Republican Congress in 2010, management of wolves in the Northern Rockies returned to the states there.
36:38 Speaker 02 Conservative legislatures in the mountain states moved quickly to establish wolf hunts, with seasons and bag limits increasingly becoming so laughingly liberal that they barely qualified as management. Across most of the state of Wyoming, not even a hunting season applies. Wyoming has made most of its wolves varmints, subject to being shot on sight at any time of the year, except in its northwest corner. Just as decisively, the mountain states took wolf management out of the hands of its university scientists and even its wildlife agencies. In fact, state wolf management in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming
37:23 Speaker 02 increasingly looks like a reprise of the philosophy of the 1880s, with professional hunters, bounties, luring wolves with bait, hunting them after dark with night vision equipment, shooting them from planes and helicopters, running them down with ATVs and snowmobiles, even to the use of wire strangle snares that tighten at every move a panicked wolf makes to escape. Even as a recent outbreak of canine distemper is devastating the survival rate of regional wolf pups, Montana's goal for 2026 is to kill an astonishing 558 wolves in the state.
38:06 Speaker 02 Idaho hopes to reduce its wolf population by 90% by 2028.
38:13 Speaker 02 Rather than working to recover ancient American ecologies, the intent in the northern west seems to be reducing wolf populations to just above the obligatory minimum number of animals that would trigger federal judges to return wolf management to fish and wildlife under the Endangered Species Act. Not surprisingly, the Northern Rockies example is becoming Exhibit A in arguments against current Republican bills to delist all of America's wolves and turn their fates everywhere over to the states.
38:56 Speaker 02 Because Yellowstone is owned by the public and managed by a federal agency, wolf recovery in the park has been shielded from some of the viciousness outside the park. Indeed, Yellowstone has become the premier wolf-viewing locale on earth, drawing visitors from all over the world to come see wolves in the wild, producing $82 million annually for the park's surrounding communities. With multiple prey animals and several competing predators, Yellowstone has also generated wolf research that's tremendously magnified what we know about wolves and indeed about ancient American ecologies. The way wolves produce ecosystem-wide effects
39:41 Speaker 02 that flow in all directions has been one of the park's more compelling lessons. When they were released, wolves pushed coyotes out of a primary-caded niche, and coyote numbers dropped by half before stabilizing. But magpies, ravens, eagles, grizzly bears, and even cougars have all seen their numbers grow in the park. At one wolf kill, a biologist counted 347 ravens and 49 bald eagles partaking of the largesse.
40:16 Speaker 02 With numbers once as high as 25,000, an elk decline that started prior to wolves reached a low of 5,000 in 2012. But since then, elk numbers have risen towards 10,000, a level biologists believe may be a natural wolf elk equilibrium. With elk at that level, the population of Lamar Valley bison numbers has increased now four times over. Bison, in fact, today make up 25% of the wolf diet in the Lamar Valley. Meanwhile, wolf recovery elsewhere in the West is happening before our eyes,
41:01 Speaker 02 sometimes because of human-assisted releases, more often because wolves are seeking to re-inhabit the landscapes they evolved to. While states like Utah and Texas remain loud and vociferous opponents of wolf recovery, in 2020, a voter-led initiative in Colorado empowered its wildlife officials to begin releasing an experimental, non-essential population of gray wolves into Colorado, starting in 2023. An initial 10 wolves were hard-released into Colorado west of the Continental Divide that year. The official
41:39 Speaker 02 count as of May of 2026 indicates 32 gray wolves are now present in the wilds of modern Colorado.
41:55 Speaker 02 The western state whose wolf recovery story stands probably in starkest distinction to that of Utah’s and Texas’s unyielding opposition are Montana or Idaho’s rural hostility, naturally enough, is California. Yet wolf recovery in California has not been human-assisted. Instead, in a state where wolves were wiped out by the 1920s, just as they were elsewhere in the West, wolves have been colonizing into Northern California and founding packs in the state since 2011.
42:34 Speaker 02 In that year, a male wolf California schoolchildren named Journey arrived in Siskiyou County from packs that had started naturally colonizing Oregon in the late 1990s. Journey's trek southward was followed in 2016 by a female wolf arriving in California, who apparently was a disperser from a gray wolf pack as far away as Wyoming. And here is where wolf recovery in California stands separate from that of the rest of the West, at least so far. In 2014, California moved to declare gray wolves protected as endangered species under
43:17 Speaker 02 the state's Own Endangered Species Act. In 2026, there are now roughly 90 fully protected gray wolves in California with at least 12 packs. Most are in the northern counties in the same country where the last wolves were exterminated in the period before the 1940s. Today, wolves still meet with a good deal of resentment and hostility from locals there, some of whom have argued that their wolves must have been planted by environmentalists and are not the same wolf species once found in California anyway.
43:56 Speaker 02 As if to dispute those claims, coastal gray wolves continue to disperse across California as you hear these words. Most recently, a collared female traveled some 370 miles southward from her natal pack in Plumas County, reaching Los Angeles County in late winter of 2026, and ultimately Inyo County, where this past April she became the first gray wolf in the state's Sequoia National Park in more than a century. In that kind of long-distance journey, this California wolf is not alone.
44:36 Speaker 02 Where I live, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, a female Mexican wolf, an admiring public has named Asha, has repeatedly crossed the no-go line of Interstate 40 and has twice now been captured near Taos and the Colorado border before being returned hundreds of miles to the south. There's a conclusion to draw here, I think. Having evolved in America and lived here for most of five million years, the West wolves are determined to make these last 400 years of wolf persecution
45:16 Speaker 02 an anomaly, no more than a tiny blip on the screen in their bigger biography as ancient natives, as animals from America who made the West their home back when we primates on the other side of Earth were only just starting to blink into consciousness.
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47:13 Speaker 03 So Dan, this is the Wolf episode, and I wanted to start off by...
47:20 Speaker 04 You use a framework in this episode that's very familiar to me and it occurred to me that I don't know that we've really dug into it in the context of this podcast, but anyone who took a class from you was well exposed to the idea of a new West and an old West.
47:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:42 Speaker 04 And it's a useful framework for thinking about historical change in this part of the country. But I wonder if you can unpack that for listeners. What do you mean when you talk about the old West versus the new West and how have scholars sort of used that to help understand the story of this place?
48:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, it's something that historians have been talking about now for, you know, 20 or 25 years, I guess. And what it refers to is two different kind of value systems about what the West means. And one, the old West one, is kind of the West of settlement, of farms and ranches, and a kind of a lingering conservative, we're a colony of the East, we're way out here in
48:44 Speaker 02 a part of the country where we don't really have to follow the lead of what's going on in New York or in Los Angeles. We're in a world of our own and it's a timeless world. It's a world that, in I think the sensibility of the old West, that really begins for a lot of people sometime in the 1870s when a lot of their ancestors come out and settle and create farms and ranches and that sort of thing. Particularly in the northern West and the southwest, it's obviously an older kind of stretching back into time experience, but.
49:27 Speaker 02 It begins to conflict with a new version of the West that really, I think, takes its root probably certainly after World War II, but more than likely you would say you first start getting a glimmering of the New West in the late 60s and early 70s, when the West becomes a destination for a lot of people moving from other parts of the country. And what they're interested in is not necessarily setting up farms and ranches. They're interested in the adventure possibilities of the West. They're interested in things like fly fishing and in hunting and in mountain climbing and backpacking
50:10 Speaker 02 and running rivers and all of the recreational opportunities that kind of define a sort of a contemporary possibility of life in the West. Very much like the last episode when we talked about going down the Grand Canyon. I mean, that's very much a new Western experience that hardly any old Westerners ever did. And so it becomes a kind of a way of looking at the West that develops two different value systems. The value system of the New West is one where we appreciate preserving diverse cultures, having native
50:52 Speaker 02 people do well and be on the landscape and being available in terms of their culture and their insights about the world. We appreciate public lands and wilderness and wild and scenic rivers and things like returning wild animals that had been obliterated in this earlier phase back to the Western story. And that obviously is in conflict with a group of people who believe that what they did by eliminating all those things sort of established the baseline civilization that they all wanted to hang on to. So the kind of confrontation between the Old West and the New West in the modern era is one
51:35 Speaker 02 of the great stories about this part of the world.
51:40 Speaker 04 It's obviously playing, playing out right in front of us here in Bozeman, where it's extremely visible, but it's, it's, it's really those who come to this part of the world or came to this part of the world for resource.
51:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:55 Speaker 04 Versus those who came to this part of the world for amenities.
51:58 Speaker 02 Yeah. That's a good way to put it.
52:02 Speaker 04 There's,
52:05 Speaker 04 I guess the natural transition there might be to, when you talk about wolves in Yellowstone, you, you highlight the economic
52:17 Speaker 04 impact of, of wolf-based tourism and
52:22 Speaker 04 I think it's an interesting point, but there's some tension there in the idea that if, if the world lost interest in those wolves, I imagine that you would still want them there if they didn't generate a dollar for the gas station in Gardner, right?
52:43 Speaker 04 It's kind of an interesting argument, I, I guess, like it's, it's the, the wolf reintroduction has, is, is inspired by sort of a deep principle that's rooted in science. And yet it, you often see the economic argument that is, you know, usually sort of ranchers are the ones pointing to economic costs.
53:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:07 Speaker 04 So I wonder if you can sort of speak to that, the tension that goes on and, and sort of how this debate is framed.
53:14 Speaker 02 Well, I think the, the economic argument is clearly a way to
53:22 Speaker 02 admit that we live in a capitalist country and almost any act you take has to be justified in terms of the sort of money that it's likely to provide. And it is a funny thing because, I mean, I've had the experience of, of staying in places like Gardner and having, you know, a hotel manager welcome all these people who are coming to the Lamar Valley, basically to watch wolves. And then in his private time, I once saw the same guy wearing a T-shirt that said, "Smoke a pack a day", and he wasn't talking about smoking a pack of cigarettes.
53:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
53:58 Speaker 02 So it's this kind of-
54:01 Speaker 02 Tension that the whole wolf story has, has given us between the Old West and the New West. And what I've tried to, to make clear, and so in this podcast, I've done three wolf episodes. I did, uh, Western Wolves in the 19th century, the Wolf West, I call it. And then I did a second episode, um, that was essentially, I called it Golden Eyed Lightning Rod, and it was about the story of wolves in the West when we were wiping them out from 1900 to 1950 or so. And what I, I said in that particular episode, and I tried to, to bring it up again in this
54:42 Speaker 02 one, is that what has given us this sense that wolves need to be back on the Western landscape is the discoveries through the science of ecology and of paleontology, that wolves have been here for millions of years. They have been part of the landscape here, part of the ecological processes here for some five million years in North America. And the old world idea, having successfully, because they were herders and successfully got rid of their wolves, coming here 500 years ago, and immediately, I mean, the very
55:24 Speaker 02 first act that Europeans, uh, enacted in terms of the environment was to place a bounty on wolves. I mean, that kind of hubris where we're going to go to a whole new continent and we're going to replicate what we just did in the place where we've been living, without making any effort to understand the role that wolves actually played in the history of the place or in the ecology of the place. I mean, it's one of those kind of classic, you know, old European, we're going around the world and we know what the hell is going on everywhere and we're going to tell everybody what to do. And it turned out to be a mistake. And so what I've tried to convey in these wolf episodes is this history of how
56:11 Speaker 02 How it all played out, and this one, of course, is about how wolves have been recovered. And the political battles over it, I think, were in no way unexpected.
56:24 Speaker 04 Right.
56:24 Speaker 02 Everybody knew what was going to happen when we brought wolves back. And in fact, when wolves were first released in Yellowstone, there were people who were involved in opening the doors and releasing wolves who I've talked to, they said they couldn't believe it. Couldn't believe that it was actually a possible thing to do. But we managed to make it happen, and it's changing the West once again.
56:49 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah, I wonder, when we talk about the political fallout from reintroduction,
57:01 Speaker 04 you trace this out in the episode that there are sort of two parallel stories. One is active reintroduction and the other is recolonization. And you point out, you know, right around the time they're discussing the Yellowstone reintroduction, there's wolves coming into Glacier from Canada. And we sort of see this, it happened again recently in Colorado with the wolf reintroduction. I feel like I saw a lot of subject matter experts say, well, truthfully, they were going to get there at some point. And so they're really only getting ahead of what would naturally happen as wolves move south.
57:40 Speaker 04 And so I wonder if you can speak to sort of the stakes of active reintroduction versus recolonization? Because I think the recolonization story also is one that's,
57:59 Speaker 04 like, it's something that should be celebrated, that they can occupy these habitats and move across the landscape.
58:04 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And
58:09 Speaker 02 You know, you could, you could say, you could argue that had we not done any hard releases, had Colorado not done their hard release in 2023, wolves would have gotten there eventually. I mean, it might be 20 or 30 years down the timeline. Maybe a straggler or two would have arrived earlier than that, but having actual breeding packs and, and a substantial population of wolves would have probably taken considerably longer. And so that's the reason for the hard releases is to go ahead and let's make this happen because if we simply allow natural re-inhabitation from places like Alberta
58:51 Speaker 02 to take place, it's going to be a 50-year period probably to reacquire wolves. But it is one of the features of what's happening now. And because we've got significant wolf populations in the Northern Rockies and in the Southwest both, it's happening now on a scale that has not been apparent before. I mean, the California story that I told in this particular script, I mean, it is, it has all been re-inhabitation by wolves moving down primarily from Washington and Oregon. And so there has not been a hard release of wolves in California, but there, there are more than 50 wolves in California
59:36 Speaker 02 right now. 12 packs, I think, was the latest figure I heard. I think the figure's actually 90 wolves and 12 packs. And that's all been from natural re-colonization.
59:46 Speaker 04 Yeah. And it just strikes me that that is sort of less politically fractious.
59:54 Speaker 02 I think it is.
59:54 Speaker 04 If that's the right word.
59:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:56 Speaker 04 Then, then, then reintroduction, you know, it's sort of an interesting counterfactual to think about.
1:00:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:01 Speaker 04 Had, had there not been a hard release. What would the discourse look like today?
1:00:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think it would have been less of a fight it out in the streets kind of issue. I will note, and I tried to tell this story because I sort of was anticipating that you and I might talk about that very thing. I didn't want to talk about when wolves were beginning to colonize in Montana in the 1980s, in particular, in the early 90s. Most of those early wolves ended up getting killed. I mean, so the bear paw wolf shows up on the Rocky Mountain front. He doesn't last a year before somebody shoots him. And then those wolves that colonized in the nine mile valley outside Missoula, you know, within two or three months, the female with a radio collar
1:00:53 Speaker 02 on her neck was shot and killed. And the male managed to get the pups that she had had up to about six months old. And then he got run over on Interstate 90, got hit by a car. And so when the numbers are so small in that early colonization stage, the attrition rate is pretty high. And that became one of the arguments for hard release is that, okay, we've got some colonizing, but man, they seem to be disappearing almost as fast as they show up. But I do agree, and I think it's one of the reasons why it's a little easier in California, plus the more
1:01:33 Speaker 02 liberal politics there, is that wolves in California have naturally colonized. It doesn't mean that the people in the northern counties are happy about it. You know, they're still screaming bloody murder about the wolves there. But nonetheless, I think that natural colonization does have this effect of making people think, well, this is not something that we're doing. This is happening in spite of some sort of positive or negative human action.
1:02:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, and one sort of final thought here, I guess, it always strikes me as...
1:02:15 Speaker 04 If you, if you arrived in the West with no context, I think it would be very striking to realize that one of the big cultural points of division is an animal. Right? And I wonder about other places on earth where there's an analog to this. Where it's, there's an animal that's the focus of so much political strife. And it's, there's fingers pointing at the, you know, you're, you're responsible for this animal. You want to kill all these and it's like, it's just a very unique story to the West. I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's other examples around the world, but
1:03:02 Speaker 04 you know, it's, it's a very strange part of our politics.
1:03:06 Speaker 02 Well, it is. There's no question about it. And what I will say is that, you know, I've stressed several times in this podcast, in these scripts, that one of the things we did as a country, the United States did, is we attempted to emulate the countries of Western Europe. Instead of, I mean, we had an opportunity to create something wholly new. And in the West, I think with the public lands, we did do that. We created something wholly new. But America had the chance to create something wholly new. And what we kept wanting to do was we're going to make ourselves like England or France. We're just going to clone these countries of Western Europe. What's interesting to me in a question like this is that today,
1:03:49 Speaker 02 because the West has begun to rewild in this form and reintroduce animals like gray wolves, the Europeans suddenly have decided that we're setting the model. And so one of the things that's happening in Western Europe right now is that country after country is releasing, reintroducing wolves into Western Europe. That's a mind blowing thing to think, but there are more wolves in Western Europe today than there are. In the United States, and that's kind of a shocking thing to consider. But who they learned this from is us.
1:04:31 Speaker 04 Right.
1:04:31 Speaker 02 So we have admirers elsewhere in the world for what we're doing, despite all the battles that we're having about it here on our home turf.
1:04:40 Speaker 04 Very interesting. Well, Dan, as always, it's been good.
1:04:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, Rattle. Great, man.
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Previous Ep. 36: Down the West’s Grandest Canyon | The American West Next Ep. 38: The River That Flowed From Nowhere, Part I | The American West Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated