“The Great Wolf Massacre” explores the interplay of extralegal action, economic hardship, and the memory of the nation’s founding. Stretching back to colonial precedents, state legislatures had passed bounties on wolves to encourage their eradication and the development of agriculture. During a time when governments skewed economic advantages toward land speculators, who leveraged their political connections and wealth to acquire millions of acres of land, the bounties were a relatively rare and potentially lucrative bonus to common Americans. New York State continually renewed these laws, including in 1820 when the legislature set the state bounty at $20 and allowed local town and county governments to do the same. To collect the bounty, a hunter brought the wolf to the local justice of the peace and swore an oath. Far from the legislature, in northern New York’s Franklin County, wolf killing became the story of 1821, when over 600 were allegedly killed in that county alone. This spectacular success was actually a great fraud, technically widespread perjury according to the bounty statute. Passing taxes on absentee landlords, town and county governments paid $20 for each wolf killed, bringing the total amount to $60 per animal at a time when many residents were worth only a few hundred dollars. The scope of the fraud—necessitating justices of the peace, local governments, and dozens of “hunters”—meant that a significant portion of the community decided to endorse law-breaking for economic gain. The motivation for this fraud were hardships: failure to achieve the prosperity promised by the America Revolution’s acquisition of new land; destruction from the War of 1812 (residents tried and failed to meet the precise legal requirement for government compensation for lost property); old age; and finally, a Panic in 1819 that made paying debts difficult, leading to widespread foreclosures. Left with no other options, Americans turned to stealing money from absentee landlords, who would pay for the bounties through county-imposed taxes, and the State of New York, which matched county funded bounties. This scandal received attention from the highest levels of the state government, including the senate and governor DeWitt Clinton.
Despite its notoriety, by the late-nineteenth century the incident was only recalled in local histories that portrayed it as something of an embarrassing joke perpetrated by anonymous locals—in effect, the scandal became an obscure footnote to American history. Rather than a footnote the “Great Wolf Massacre” was part of an American tradition of rural discontent and egalitarianism, embedded in extralegal movements that fueled the country’s Revolution but were later downplayed. Featuring a rendered map of New York c. 1820, this presentation will visualize actual wolf hunting throughout New York State and the scale of fraud. Moreover, the presentation will depict the shifting geography of wolf-hunting over time toward increasingly marginal lands for farming—but also land dominated by wealthy, absentee landlords. These maps reveal the shaky loyalties along the northern border of the early American republic.
