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at Mount McKinley was also due to aggressive hunting and poisoning of them all around the perimeter of this national park. Because wolves in the Alaska Range were struggling to survive, Murie was overjoyed whenever he discovered a healthy den. “Wolves vary much in color, size, contour, and action,” he wrote. “No doubt there is also much variation in temperament. Many are so distinctively colored or patterned that they can be identified from afar. I found the grey ones easier to identify since there is more individual variation in color pattern among them than in black wolves.”3

Wolves were already considered predators of livestock throughout America, from the Rio Grande to the Beaufort Sea, and a sizable bounty was offered for wolf pelts, so Murie had his work cut out for him. To Alaskans, it seemed, killing wolves wasn’t a sport but an imperative. Fur trappers, bounty hunters, and cattle barons all abided by the “culture code of the pioneer,” which was to “kill what couldn’t be dominated.”4 In the vernacular of the territory it was called “getting your meat.”5 The Denali wilderness, Murie would write, had a wildlife population almost as diverse as Yellowstone’s; he was grieved by Alaskans’ reckless attitude toward predators. It was Murie’s mission to make sure that Mount McKinley maintained its original wolf population.6

The counterforce to Adolph Murie in Alaska was Frank Glaser (also known as the “Wolf Man”). Never before or since has Alaska produced such an efficient exterminator of wolves as Glaser. From 1915 to 1966 Glaser killed wolves. It didn’t matter to Glaser whether a client was an Eskimo enclave wanting to save caribou from wolf packs or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanting to contain the spread of rabies; he would kill wolves for cash. His weapon of choice was his “coyote getter,” a set device that fired cyanide if triggered by a coyote. But he had other tools of the trade as well. He could kill wolves with strychnine bait, a rifle, snares, and traps. “Frank was like an Indian at picking up a wolf sign that was all but invisible to me,” Charles Gray, an Alaskan game warden, recalled. “He knew which clump of grass they urinated on and which little ridge they preferred to travel on. I was always in awe of his knowledge of wolves, for he was almost always right.”7 Glaser’s motto, “The only good wolf is a dead wolf,” summarized his hatred of predators.

Wilderness surveyors like Charles Sheldon also saw wolves as a menace to big game, “the chief enemy of the caribou,” always “hovering about the feeding herd and following them around as they roamed, usually in a fairly well-defined circuit.”8 Hikers in the uninhabited Yukon Flats told of wolf packs shadowing them for days, seemingly looking for an opportunity to kill.9 The Biological Survey itself turned against wolves throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Influenced by Vernon Bailey’s booklet Wolves in Relation to Stock, Game, and the National Forest Reserves (1907), Merriam considered all predators lesser species than big game. Bailey, who married Merriam’s sister Florence, wanted Alaskan wolves exterminated wherever they encroached on civilization.10 “The fierce destructiveness of large wolves and of mountain lions,” the 1924 Annual Report of the Biological Survey read, “both to domestic animals and game, is so great that it becomes a necessity to eliminate them from certain areas.”11

Only a few weeks after Franklin D. Roosevelt moved into the White House in March 1933, Aldo Leopold published Game Management with Charles Scribner’s Sons. In 481 pages, Leopold created the discipline of modern wildlife management. Pioneering in the burgeoning fields of systems ecology and genetics, he supported protecting wolves in ecosystems (albeit managed). A lifelong hunter, Leopold explained exactly why big game such as moose, Dall sheep, deer, antelope, and elk needed large habitats to survive properly. Filled with scientific charts and survey studies, interspersed with ideas espoused by Darwin and Malthus, Game Management introduced Leopold to the general public as the