Paul Cooper
"Red Wolf (Canis rufus)" by Paul Cooper at Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
One of my earliest memories occurred about sixty years ago when I was squirrel hunting with my father and two brothers in Dugdemona swamp. Our two fiests, Lady and Tramp, had run out of sight, but we soon found them sniffing what appeared to be a large, dead German shepherd. Pop declared it was a wolf and since this was before coyotes became commonplace, I believe he was right.
Red wolves once roamed all over the southeastern United States. Larger than a coyote but smaller than a timber wolf, they weigh between forty-five and eighty pounds. Red wolves are roughly four feet long from nose to the tip of the tail and are about two feet tall at the shoulder. Their legs are long and slender with big feet, and their heads are wide, with broad muzzles and pointed ears.
Red wolves mate for life and travel in family packs of five to eight animals. Their diet consists of deer and small mammals, such as rabbits and raccoons, and a pack will roam up to twenty miles a day looking for food.
When the French arrived in Louisiana in 1699, red wolves were commonplace. LePage DuPratz was one explorer who wrote rather extensively about them. According to DuPratz, “The wolf is very common in the hunting countries; and when the hunter makes a hut for himself in the evening upon the bank of a river, if he sees the wolf, he may be confident that the buffaloes are not at a very great distance. It is said, that this animal, not daring to attack the buffalo when in a herd, will come and give notice to the hunter that he may kill him, in hopes of coming in for the offals.”
DuPratz also described how the wolves hunted the Louisiana buffalo. “They come so near that the buffalos smell them some way off, which makes them run for it. The wolves then advance with a pretty equal pace, till they observe the fattest out of breath. These they attack before and behind; one of them seizes on the buffalo by the hind-quarter, and overturns him, the others strangle him.”
As Louisiana’s population grew, contact with wolves became more frequent, and newspapers often reported these encounters. In 1883, a Winn Parish paper informed its readers that “little Horace Dunn of this place was making a [deer] drive for his father, near the Saline [Bayou], his dog was attacked by a wolf, and a fight of a few minutes ensued, which resulted in the death of the dog. Horace fired several rifle shots at the wolf, but all to not [sic] effect. We guess he was too nervous to take good aim.”
Stories of wolf encounters seemed to have peaked in the early twentieth century. A Welsh, Louisiana, newspaper reported in 1909 that “wolves have been causing considerable loss of chickens, pigs, and calves in the neighborhood north of Welsh, a posse of men and dogs went out Saturday morning to hunt them down.” The dogs managed to run three wolves but the hunters only killed one.
Over the next few years, Natchitoches Parish residents around Black Lake complained of “ravaging” wolves, and two wolf encounters were reported near Colfax. One of those occurred when some squirrel hunters jumped a pack of five wolves and killed two. The men claimed the wolves were much larger than their hunting dogs.
When another group of Colfax men killed a male wolf, they found a den and nine pups nearby. The hunters collected the pups and then set their dogs on the she-wolf. The newspaper claimed, “Then began the hottest wolf chase that we have had in this region for forty years.” After a four-hour race, one of men finally killed the wolf. The reporter did not say what happened to the nine pups.
In 1944, my great uncle Dayton Jones had his own encounter with a Winn Parish wolf. The local newspaper reported that a large, black “timber wolf” had been attacking the livestock on farms in the Cypress Creek community and was believed to have killed several hogs, as well. One day Uncle Dayton heard one of his calves in distress and was able to stalk and kill the wolf. Since timber wolves have never lived in Louisiana, the animal in question was almost certainly a red wolf.
While there once was a thriving population of red wolves in Louisiana, they no longer roam our woods and prairies. Next month’s column will look at what happened to them.
Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. For an autographed copy of “Louisiana Pastimes,” a collection of the author’s stories, send $25 to Terry L. Jones, P.O Box 1581, West Monroe, LA 71294.
Find more photos of Red Wolves at photographer Paul Cooper's Flickr page, here.
